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High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

landgreen.github.io

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Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#41

Post by mncharity »

> We are going to focus on the two types of dry friction: static and kinetic.

"dry friction"... As I remember the story, someone was trying to replicate Arrheniius's equipment and results. The results weren't matching, until they took the equipment to an outreach event... where it got covered with greasy fingerprints. Turns out, it's Arrheniius's law of large objects sliding on pig fat.

We actually now understand friction down to nanoscale. Something that wasn't true a decade ago. But I've never seen introductory friction content written to reflect that.

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#42

Post by mncharity »

Perhaps take screenshots of your favorite interactives, and add them to a new "Highlights" section of the landing page? To guard against people stopping by, randomly sampling a few pages, and by chance, missing interesting ones, and thus giving up and going away, not knowing they missed fun things. Sort of like the extract of figures from a paper - something to trigger "oh, that looks interesting".

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#43

Post by jacobolus »

lilgreenland wrote: post #34
bakkoting wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've got some free time this summer so let me know if you have any advice about what else to add. If you're taking nitpicks: some of your example calculations don't track units, like the ones on https://landgreen.github.io/physics/notes/momentum/1-intro/i... . I think they should: encouraging students to always track units in intermediate steps is really helpful for getting them to think about what they're doing an…

Thats an interesting point. I think high school physics teachers are split on units. I'm willing to change teams. The argument for just showing units at the end is that students who are just starting to master algebra have trouble with the extra symbols. I think I should add units for more of the LaTex example problems. Maybe I could color code the units so it doesn't get confusing.

Poor understanding of / fluency with units is definitely one of the things that sets people back hardest when they get to higher levels.

I say start throwing units in as early as possible (grade school?).

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#44

Post by lilgreenland »

mncharity wrote: post #40
lilgreenland wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats an interesting point. I think high school physics teachers are split on units. I'm willing to change teams. The argument for just showing units at the end is that students who are just starting to master algebra have trouble with the extra symbols. I think I should add units for more of the LaTex example problems. Maybe I could color code the units so it doesn't get confusing.

With conflicting objectives, it might be worth providing multiple versions. A version optimized for "the students' bottleneck on their upcoming high-stakes exam is arithmetic, not physics". A version emphasizing units - without which numbers are nonsensical - and deemphasizing numbers, down to dimensional analysis. A version emphasizing the equation's parts, and story, to provide a qualitative feel for the phenomenon…

This Cal Tech style sounds neat. Let me know if you know more, I couldn't find anything on google.

HA, I'm so inconsistent with my spaces on units. I'll add that to my summer todo list.

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#45

Post by lilgreenland »

lilgreenland wrote: post #34
bakkoting wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've got some free time this summer so let me know if you have any advice about what else to add. If you're taking nitpicks: some of your example calculations don't track units, like the ones on https://landgreen.github.io/physics/notes/momentum/1-intro/i... . I think they should: encouraging students to always track units in intermediate steps is really helpful for getting them to think about what they're doing an…

Thats an interesting point. I think high school physics teachers are split on units. I'm willing to change teams. The argument for just showing units at the end is that students who are just starting to master algebra have trouble with the extra symbols. I think I should add units for more of the LaTex example problems. Maybe I could color code the units so it doesn't get confusing.

I'm adding this here as a part of my growing todo list:

Add in more explicit unit analysis problems to each unit. Add in unit tracking to more solutions.

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#46

Post by lilgreenland »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #37
lilgreenland wrote: post #2

I just completed my two year project to build an online website to pair with my 11th grade physics classes. I hope it can be a resource for those learning and teaching physics. I've got some free time this summer so let me know if you have any advice about what else to add.

These are really great—going to share the Waves page on @cookingwthsound. One thing I REALLY have been wanting to see, and maybe something you can try, is coupling the interactive visualization with the equation that generates it, and ideally showing the values plugged into that equation and make those values editable. Something to think about!

The sine wave simulation is my poor attempt at letting the students discover the equations. My hope is that they will discover the wave equation and the inverse relationship between period and frequency.

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#47

Post by lilgreenland »

mncharity wrote: post #42

Perhaps take screenshots of your favorite interactives, and add them to a new "Highlights" section of the landing page? To guard against people stopping by, randomly sampling a few pages, and by chance, missing interesting ones, and thus giving up and going away, not knowing they missed fun things. Sort of like the extract of figures from a paper - something to trigger "oh, that looks interesting".

That's a good idea. My current solution is to just try and make every page awesome, but I know some sections have more love than others.

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#48

Post by lilgreenland »

mncharity wrote: post #41

> We are going to focus on the two types of dry friction: static and kinetic. "dry friction"... As I remember the story, someone was trying to replicate Arrheniius's equipment and results. The results weren't matching, until they took the equipment to an outreach event... where it got covered with greasy fingerprints. Turns out, it's Arrheniius's law of large objects sliding on pig fat. We actually now understand fri…

I'm not that knowledgeable on friction. Do you think the friction equations are OK for high school level physics?

Would you say that this is accurate?

"Kinetic friction is primarily caused by chemical bonding between surfaces; however, in many cases roughness is dominant."

Re: High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations

#49

Post by lilgreenland »

pickle-ts wrote: post #20

I love this kind of stuff - just a bit envious I didn't have these kind of resources when I was a kid! Javascript simulations are easy to write, and help enormously with visualization. Here's a special relativity simulation I wrote in ~100 lines of code: http://pickle-ts.com/relativity Source code you can play with live: https://stackblitz.com/edit/pickle-samples?file=app%2Frelati...

Cool!
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