20121014

Online reading assignment: energy forms and conservation

Physics 205A, fall semester 2012
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Students have a weekly online reading assignment (hosted by SurveyMonkey.com), where they answer questions based on reading their textbook, material covered in previous lectures, opinion questions, and/or asking (anonymous) questions or making (anonymous) comments. Full credit is given for completing the online reading assignment before next week's lecture, regardless if whether their answers are correct/incorrect. Selected results/questions/comments are addressed by the instructor at the start of the following lecture.

The following questions were asked on reading textbook chapters and previewing a presentation on energy forms and conservation.

Selected/edited responses are given below.

Describe something you found interesting from the assigned textbook reading or presentation preview, and explain why this was personally interesting for you.
"Energy is only transformed into different forms, and is neither created nor destroyed."

"Dissipation of energy'' is used instead of saying 'something does work.'"

"Conservative forces such as gravity do not change mechanical energy, they just change from one form of mechanical energy into another."

"It takes the same amount of work to lift an object into the back of a truck or to roll it up a frictionless ramp as long as the vertical distance was the same."
Describe something you found confusing from the assigned textbook reading or presentation preview, and explain why this was personally confusing for you.
"Conservative versus nonconservative forces."

"There are so many equations in this chapter, that I am confused with what I am supposed to do with all of them. I get the concept of energy, but at the same time, I felt like each section of reading was saying a different thing, which made me confused about what I was actually reading."
Ask the instructor an anonymous question, or make a comment. Selected questions/comments may be discussed in class.
"Possibly have a review day before the quizzes where we go over and complete a practice quiz as a whole entire class?" (We can go over selected problems before a quiz, but you should complete the archived quiz for yourself, and come to office hours or e-mail me if you have problems.)

"What to do about this last midterm... I put so much 'energy' into it and got nothing in return. That was a total energy transfer that yearns to prove the law of conservation of energy wrong." (We'll discuss midterm scores and in-progress grade standings when midterms are handed back.)

"Is there an opportunity for extra credit besides from lab work?" (There will be several online extra-credit assignments later this semester.)

"Since I'm too lazy to look up the syllabus, is there a second midterm, and a cumulative final?" (Yes.)

No comments:

Post a Comment