At the end of each semester, I like to think about what worked and didn’t quite work for each of my classes. In this case, it’s the dreaded summer session (yes, it’s very intense). I had 2 introductory physics lecture courses and two labs.

The summer session takes place from the beginning of June to the end of July. Lecture courses meet Monday-Thursday for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Labs meet every other day (twice a week for both) for 2 hours.

The enrollment this summer was way lower than previous years. Actually, last year dropped from the previous years also. I’m not sure there will be enough demand for these courses next year (which means I will need to find something else to do).

For the lecture courses, we use College Physics 5th ed (Giambattista). We have an agreement with the publisher to use the online version of the textbook along with their online homework (both of which mostly suck in my humble opinion). Oh, the textbook is OK—just not the ONLINE version.

Algebra-Based Intro Physics

These are our introductory algebra-based physics courses. The students in the course are mostly biology, engineering technology, industrial technology, and kinesiology.

Physics 1 (it’s not actually called that). This course covers forces, energy, momentum, and torque (maybe angular momentum also). It’s pretty much your standard first semester physics.

I did make chapter summary videos (which I think are fairly nice). Here is my video playlist with the summaries and sample problems (playlist).

Physics 2. The second semester of physics traditionally covers electric fields, magnetic fields, DC circuits, AC circuits, light, optics. Personally, this course is a bit of a train wreck. We try to teach all these awesome things (electric and magnetic fields and their relationship) but without the calculus to back it up. In the end, the textbook just becomes a series of equations that might as well just be magic incantations of physics. I sort of hate it.

My goal for Physics 2 was to transform it into more of a physical science type of course with added calculations. I figured that it would be better to look at a wider range of ideas and include an emphasis on energy and power (real world stuff). I would love to rewrite the curriculum to focus on this, but of course I didn’t have enough time before the semester started.

So, as a compromise (with myself) I ended up with the following:

• Electric field / electric potential – just the very basics. I didn’t do any weird stuff that requires unit vectors for the electric field.
• DC circuits. Again, nothing crazy in terms of solving circuits.
• Magnetic fields and forces. You are pretty limited here in terms of calculations. I just did loops and straight wires.
• Faraday’s law and stuff.
• Light and electromagnetic waves.
• Optics

At the end I included a lot of fun stuff in astronomy (the students liked that).

Here are my chapter summaries and sample problems (playlist).

Let’s talk about grading. Normally, I would give short in-class standards and allow students to submit video reassessments. However, this semester I decided to JUST do video reassessments since the classes were small. Oh, I don’t know if that was a good idea or not. But I did it.

There was also assigned homework problems from the book. Students worked these out on paper and uploaded images to google classroom (which works great)—I then grade them manually. Of course, I mostly just gave full credit for the HW but they aren’t worth many points. I like the HW grade because it gives students some structure in their study schedule. This way, they have an idea of what and when they should understand some stuff.

There was also a final exam. I don’t know if this was the best idea since they didn’t have any other in-class assessments, but it was there. Some students scored quite well on the exams but others did very not well.

Other random thoughts:

• In the past, I have required students to do some type of numerical calculation (it doesn’t have to be with python). I didn’t do that this semester—although I did go over this quite a few times in class.
• I love speed dating problem solving (where students work on problems in different groups). However, with such low numbers in class it was rather difficult to get this to work.
• For the start of most classes, I liked to show some interesting application or real world example of physics. These were fun for me, but I think the students liked them also. Maybe I will put together a list of the start topics.
• Oh, during the first week of class I was out of two for 3 days (APS conference). Originally, I was going to have someone cover for me but that fell through. Instead, I just posted some online lectures and practice problems. This is not a great way to start the semester.
• Before the semester, there were students that asked about an online class. I think this is a terrible idea (from a learning perspective). However, a chemistry had an online version of the course this summer and enrollment was huge.

For the future, I would like to start fresh in terms of curriculum. That’s my plan at least.

Physics Lab

There are two labs that go along with the two intro physics courses. I sort of messed these up this semester.

Since the summer schedule is brutal, I decided to split each lab into two days. For the first meeting, I would show them a all the physics and equipment. The second day would focus on “project” day where the students would create their own lab experiment to use for a write up. I told them they could work online with some material if they liked. The emphasis here was on creative and real-world labs.

Honestly, there were some students that did some awesome stuff. I was super impressed. Other students used the project day to just skip the first lab day and do the most basic lab that I suggested (disappointing). The lab report were mostly uninspiring (except for a few shining stars).

Here are the physics 1 lab topics:

• Forces and vectors (equilibrium).
• Measuring acceleration
• Video analysis (I haven’t used this lab in many years—but now that Tracker Video analysis can be used online I gave it a try).
• Newton’s second law
• Numerical calculations (online lab for the July 4th holiday).
• Circular motion
• Collisions and momentum

Physics 2 labs:

• Electric fields and charges.
• Energy and circuits (Power and stuff)
• Magnetic fields
• Electromagnetic induction and motors and generators (I wish I had more LEGO motors for this ).
• Optics
• Interference and diffraction.

Here’s the awesome LEGO motors.

The second semester lab is just really difficult. I need to change stuff for the future.