W1.1 Overview
Aims
These sections form part of the face to face teaching of the course in Edinburgh as workshops in which students work through these various activities each week in group sof 5 or 6. They are included here for your information. The timings are largely irrelevant in this context.
The weekly programme
Your weekly programme will be built out of a number of activities. This section explains what they are, and what they are for.
Problem solving This is one of the key skills we want to you develop during this course (and beyond!). Mastery of it (which will take a lot longer than 11 weeks......) is arguably one of the most important attributes a Physics (or any other) graduate should be able to demonstrate. There will be two activities each week to enable you to practise and improve. For both of these ensure that everyone contributes. If you are stuck/lost there is a fair chance that someone else will be too: so don’t be afraid to say so. If you feel on top of things do not be aloof: helping others understand is the best way of checking out whether you really do yourself!
Question of the Week There will be one of these each workshop for you to solve by working together. The questions will be based around ’real-world’ situations (there’ll be no ’spherical chickens in a vacuum’ here......) and will give you a chance to apply the problem solving strategy described in S0.5.
Course Questions You will spend a good bit of each afternoon working on the Course Questions in the Course Handbook. We will refer to them as (eg) Q1.1, Q1.2…. You will not have time to cover all the course questions assigned on a given week: as the course progresses the number of questions per week will grow! You will need to invest time outside classes to complete these. Obviously you should be prepared to give more time to questions that you see as particularly significant or difficult. You should not expect to write a set of full solutions during the workshops themselves. The aim should be that at the end of the day you have covered the ground well enough that you can write a set of solutions, in your own time
Challenge While we want you to feel that physics ‘makes-sense’ we also want to challenge you with things that perhaps don’t make sense immediately. In this course, these will be virtual ones.
Core maths skill You may already appreciate (if not, you soon will) how deeply entwined physics is with mathematics: if you are to ‘do’ physics successfully you must become comfortable with the language of mathematics. This means (amongst other things) being really confident with a set of core maths skills. We will occasionally get you to practice them explicitly.
Banana skin There are some mistakes which every generation of students is prone to make: we really would like to help you avoid them. So from time to time we will show you the ‘banana skins’ on which your predecessors have slipped.