Welcome to NHS Physics! These first 3 days we . . .
* introduced some of the basics of kinematics (study of motion)
* spend some time on the west lawn doing some walking and running
* graph our various journeys on the west lawn.
Here are the pictures with captions from week #1:
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- Highlight of my summer: Got to hang out with Olive and Dinkle in Portland. Surely you all know them. Not a Portlandia fan?
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- Freshmen arrive at NHS and must pass through the welcome Gauntlet. One of the best things NHS does in my opinion. We have the best students in the world.
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- Mr. Lifsics always looks so nice on opening day. Got to admit. The kid’s got style.
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- The map of our West Lawn.
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- this wasn’t us, but it should look familiar
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- Unnecessary math.
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- Went back to this old activity to work on our “teaching” each other. I was very impressed with your help sessions.
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- Here are some of the words we used when talking about the 12 nails balanced on one activity.
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- I will add images or items to these screen shots just because. We might talk about them a little when we go over these slides on Monday.
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- Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was huge in the formation of Newton’s ideas. Maybe the greatest philosopher of his time.
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- Descartes gave us the cartesian coordinate system as a way of referencing space. You can blame him for all the graphing you will be doing in the first two packets. We don’t graph so much after that, but there is no better way to quickly visualize a quantitative relationship than to graph the data.
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- The graph of our first walk to main street. Notice the labeling of the axes with dimension AND unit. The linearity shows that we walked at a constant velocity the entire 50 meters.
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- Adding the second run back from Main street sidewalk to the science lot sidewalk. This slide also shows our first Physics symbol equation.
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- Here’s all four journeys.
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- Famous painting of Socrates and Plato. It was the greatest lineage of teacher to student to teacher to student . . . Socrates taught Plato. Plato taught Aristotle. Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. All this happened around 400 BCE.
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- Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) was the first modern day physicist in my opinion.The first one to actually do a quantitative lab on kinematics, measure the results and develop an equation. More about that later.
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- Slope on our linear graphs is rise over run. Rise is in term of change in position (∆x). ∆ is the symbol for change so ∆x means a change in position. Run is in terms of ∆t. So ∆x / ∆t is in terms of meters per second which we call velocity (don’t call it speed).
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- Algebra gives you the general form of quantitative relationships where y is the general symbol for vertical axis and x is for the general symbol for the horizontal axis. Physics looks at the specific equation that describes the relationship.
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- This is the screen shot that I did the 6 minute help video on.
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- We went to the board for the first time.
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- algebra vs. physics
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- trial 3
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- An example of all four equations from the west lawn.
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- When you put some numbers in your calculator, be careful when you write out what pops up on the screen. Round and truncate to three or four digits. We’ll talk about significant figures later, but a good rule of thumb is three to four digits.
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- Hopefully this won’t be the case in here.
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- Metrics vs. Imperial units.
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- The cantina will be supporting Bethesda this year. These kids need our help.
Askey Physics 