9/13 Meese

Today in 3rd period Honors Physics it was the most deadly of all school days, unit test day. The test was over mostly vectors, how to add them and how to put them into either unit vector notation or polar vector notation, with some Bernoulli's Principle and Unit Circle sprinkled in. The worksheet titled Pondering Speed (given to the class on Monday) will be due tommorrow, as will reading pages 23 and 24 of your lab manual on how to make a good graph. To answer the question of the day, an operational definition for volume of a liquid is how much space that the liquid occupies in the container. Well, since my blog is awfully short due to the lack of classwork, I also want to state that the test we took was fairly difficult, but when I feel like I am the only one who has ever struggled in that class, or even on that test, I can always remember that I scored higher than Mrs. Lamb did on the Unit Circle portion of the test and that is something that I will always be proud of.

9/13 qod

Give an operational definition for the volume of a liquid.

--ch

9/12 qod

What common source of error in the lab did we discuss today?  What is one way of minimizing its effect?

-- ch

9/9 Lee

To start of the third period Honors Physics class, Mrs. Coats-Haan checked our book work (pg 23 #'s 32-34 and 40-43) and gave us the key.  She also collected our Football lab's from the day before.  Then, Mrs. Coats-Haan passed out the Vector Graphic Organizer that is to be due Monday.  She quickly went over the Lab that we would be working on that day.  She passed out a lamanated sheet for each table that had a group number on it.  We were told that any measuring device was allowed to be used.  The lab was executed on Main Street. Quickly, the class seperated into teams and moved towards their starting points. The sheet that was handed out at the beginning of the class told us where to start and what direction and how many feet we should go. There were multiple vectors on the sheet, but our group realized that it was more effective to add all the vectors, north with south and east with west, so that we only had one x value and one y value (somewhat like the Football Lab).  The objective of the lab was to find the "treasure" at the end of our vector, which for pour group turned out the be under a water fountain.  As each group finished, which not all the groups found their "treasure" (a piece of tape), they returned to the room and worked on the homework for Monday.  When all the groups returned, Mrs. Coats-Haan gave everyone a dumdum the flavor of our choice. 

qod answer:
It was more effective to add the vectors east and west and then the north and south so that we could find one long vector for each distance (x for east and west and y for noth and south). 

9/9 qod

What is the most efficient way to use what you learned in class to find your "treasure"?

--ch

9/8 qod

What is the one thing you can look at to determine if you need to add 180 degrees to your angle?

--ch

09/07 Harmon

To start off the third period, Coats-Haan checked our vector addition homework and passed out answer keys for us to make corrections. Once the answer keys were collected, our class was introduced a second way to solve vectors called Unit Vector Notation. the class diligently took notes from the smartboard on how to convert our old method of vectors, the polar form, to Unit Vector Notation(one solves the x and y values just like we did in the ROXY chart, and put the coefficient i with the x-value and j the y-value), and how to convert Unit Vector Notation to the polar form(one uses the Pythagorean Theorem to find the vector's magnitude, and then one has to use the inverse tangent function (y/x) to find the direction. In the moments after completing the notes for the day, Coats-Haan passed out a pair-check, which we all completed and turned in, a Unit Vector Notation worksheet, and she assigned lab manual page 9 for homework(this is a sheet we started in class and the rest was homework). In the midst of our tedious, and I mean tedious work, the bell rang, and I almost had to be dragged from the room. September 7th was another fantastic day for 3rd period physics!

QOD Answer:

The advantage of using unit vectors as opposed to polar form is that it is much easier to add unit vectors together, because all one has to do is combine like terms(i's with i's and j's with j's).