PHY 300 - Mechanics

Fall 2010
Draft Version 08/16/10
Course Objectives:
The primary goals of the course are:
to develop and strengthen a coherent mental model for intermediate mechanics (a deep
understanding of concepts and how they are interrelated)
to develop and enhance problem solving skills (the ability to tackle a new problem when
youve never before seen a problem like it)
Well also practice learning physics and solving problems more efficiently through collaborating,
explaining concepts to others, identifying our confusions, and using computers to visualize
mathematics. Topics will include kinematics and dynamics, oscillations, Lagrangian mechanics,
symmetry and conservation, central force motion, and rigid body mechanics. To solve problems
addressed by these topics, well figure out when and how to apply mathematical tools such as Taylor
series expansions, coordinate transformations, multivariable calculus, linear ordinary differential
equations, matrices, and variational calculus.
Instructor Information:
Dr. Carolyn Sealfon
office: 132 Merion Science Center (formerly Boucher Hall)
phone: 610.436.2897
email: csealfon@wcupa.edu
webpage: http://courses.wcupa.edu/csealfon
Office Hours:
TBD, or by appointment
Required Texts:
T: John R. Taylor, Classical Mechanics. University Science Books, 2005.
HRW: Halliday, Resneck, and Walker, Fundamentals of Physics, 8th Edition. Volume 1. John
Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Recommended/Supplementary Texts:
RF: R. Feynman, R. Leighton, and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Volume 1.
DM: David Morin, Introduction to Classical Mechanics. Cambridge University Press, 2007. A
few chapters are available online at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/book.html .
FC: Fowles & Cassiday, Analytical Mechanics, 7th Edition. Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2005.
Website:
This course has a Desire2Learn website associated with it, where assignments, course documents,
and relevant announcements will be posted regularly.
Computer Software:
We will be using Mathematica in this course. You may get Mathematica installed on your personal
computer (for no charge) by going to the ACC Helpdesk in Anderson Hall Room 20. Mathematica is
also installed on the computers in the Physics Library.

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Assignments:
All assignments will be posted online on Desire2Learn at least one week before the due date.
Pre-Class Assignments will help both you and me become aware of your conceptions and questions
before arriving in class. These are graded on completion and effort, not on correctness. Please
complete these individually. There are 2 kinds of pre-class assignments:
Reading Questions, based on assigned pre-class reading, are due online one hour before class.
Pre-Tests are to be printed out and completed in 15 minutes or less, and without using your
textbook or notes.
Homework Assignments are designed to help you strengthen and test your own understanding of the
course material. Due dates are scheduled to help you keep up as the course rapidly progresses and
builds on previous material. A thorough understanding of the homework will help you answer exam
questions and ensure your success on oral quizzes (see below).

Grading. Submitted homework will be graded based on completion (including explanations of
your logic/approach) on a 3-point scale (+,, -). Late homework will not be accepted. Some
assignments might not be collected for grading, at my discretion.

Collaboration & citations. I encourage collaboration on homework assignments, as you can
likely learn this material much faster and better working with others. You may also use any
resources available to you. Physicists use each others ideas all the time; they just cite each other
to avoid stealing ideas. Therefore, I ask only that you explicitly cite any ideas or hints you get
from other people, books, the internet, or other resources, in your homework. You are always
welcome to bring your solutions to my office hours, and Im happy to tell you if youre on the
right track or not.

Guidelines. Please make sure submitted homework assignments adhere to the following
guidelines to avoid plagiarism or losing credit unnecessarily:
Cite any work, derivations, or steps you get from the solutions or other sources, and any
classmates or others with whom you work. (If you do a problem completely out of your
own head, state so explicitly.)
Show your work (diagrams, set-up, and algebra) and explain your thinking (so that
someone who didnt know how to solve the problem could follow your work).
Box or circle your final answer(s). Make your conclusions clear.
The correct final answer is written only in terms of the variables given. For example, if
an objects mass is not mentioned in the question, your final answer should not depend on
the mass.
Staple your homework before you submit it, and write your ID number and the name of
the assignment on the top. Cut off any scruff from spiral notebooks.

Carets. Due to the amount of material we have to cover in Mechanics and students' many other
admirable commitments, not everyone may have time to complete all of the assigned homework.
Homework problems marked with a caret (^) may be skipped by students who are happy with
just comfortably passing PHY 300 and are not striving to earn an A. (Students who earn an A in
this course will be prepared to take a graduate-level classical mechanics course.)

Skeleton Solutions (with some steps, calculations, or logic pieces missing) will be posted online
for each assignment, to serve as a guide if you are stuck. Naturally, they will only help you learn
if you seriously attempt each problem a few times before looking at the skeleton solution. (Dont
bang your head against the wall for more than a half-hour at a time, though; at that point move on
and come back to the problem later.) Full solutions will not be posted. When you have questions
about how to complete the skeleton solutions, it is your responsibility to ask. (The process of
posing well-framed questions will also help you learn.)
The lowest Reading Assignment grade and the lowest Homework Assignment grade will be dropped.

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Exams:
I would like to allow more than the 50 minutes in class to work on an in-class exam so you will have
less time pressure. Exams will therefore be given on Tuesdays or Thursdays, and you may take the
exam during a 2-hour block of time of your choosing. (If this poses a problem, please let me know.)
There will be three exams during the semester:
Tuesday, September 28
Thursday, October 28
Tuesday, November 30
You may use a calculator and one crib sheet of your own notes (both sides of an 8.5x11" piece of
paper) for each exam.
In alignment with the PHY 300 course goals, exams will test conceptual understanding and problemsolving skills. Exam questions will challenge students to select and apply concepts and procedures to
solve new, unfamiliar problems. A recommended studying strategy is to re-work homework
problems on the chalkboard while explaining each step out-loud to your classmates, to ensure you
truly understand how to arrive at the solution well enough to apply your understanding to a different
problem. While this means exams will indeed be hard, please don't stress out over them. A typical
average score on a PHY 300 written exam is around 50%, which usually corresponds to a C letter
grade that may be raised to a B by the oral quiz (see below). Focus on keeping up with the
homework, asking questions when you don't understand something, and learning as much as you can;
that is the key.
If you are going to miss an exam for a university-excused absence, you must notify me at least two
weeks before the exam is going to be offered.
The final exam will be cumulative, and will focus slightly more on material covered after the third
exam. The final exam schedule will be posted on the registrar's website, http://www.wcupa.edu/registrar.
Oral Quizzes:
A week or so after each exam, you will have the opportunity to earn back up to 20 points on your
exam by taking a 15-minute, open-notebook, oral quiz in which you work out and explain to me the
solution to one or two problems randomly chosen from previously-assigned homework. You may
refer to your own homework answers and notes during the quiz, and you may use Mathematica.
(You may not use your textbook or print-outs of the skeleton solutions.) Oral quizzes are optional.
Optional Final Project:
This course is very mathematical and theoretical. Yet physics is an experimental science, and you
may prefer to learn concepts and demonstrate your understanding through hands-on projects than
through problems and traditional exams. In light of this, I offer the opportunity to do a project that
applies the abstract concepts and pretty mathematics learned in class.
Due to the reality of time constraints, this project is optional. If you choose to do a project, a
thorough proposal is due by mid-October. The project will count towards of your final grade and
your exam scores will accordingly count less. Guidelines for working on a project related to the
material in this course are posted on the D2L website.

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Attendance & Tutorials:

This is an upper-level class; I will not take attendance. Please email me if you know you will be
absent from class, and arrange to get the notes from a classmate, etc. Participation in in-class
tutorials (see "More About Group Work" below) is especially important in this course and counts
towards 3% of the course grade.
Grading:
Without a final project:
60% - 3 Exams (20% each)
10% - Homework & Tutorials (4% Reading Questions & Pre-Tests, 3% Homework Completion, 3%
Tutorials)
25% - Final Exam
5% - Added to whichever of the above categories is your strength
With the final project option:
45% - 3 Exams (15% each)
10% - Homework & Tutorials (4% Reading Questions & Pre-Tests, 3% Homework Completion, 3%
Tutorials)
15% - Final Exam
5% - Added to whichever of the above categories is your strength
25% - Project

In addition:
General class participation will bump borderline grades.
Everyones grade will be bumped in the following fashion: if the class average is G on a 4-point
scale, everyones final grade will be increased by (G-1.5)/6 (also on a 4-point scale). Thus, it is in
your best interest to help each other to improve the overall average of the class.
I reserve the right to introduce different forms of assessment as needed and to alter the weight of
each of the categories of assessment in the event of some unforeseen circumstance.

Disability:
We at West Chester wish to make accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please make your
needs known by contacting the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at extension 3217 as
well as myself. Sufficient notice is needed in order to make the accommodations possible. The
University and I desire to comply with the ADA of 1990.
Public Safety Phone Number: 610-436-3311

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More About Group Work

In this class, we will often be working with tutorials. Tutorials are guided-discovery worksheets that you
will work on in class, in groups, to help you learn certain challenging concepts more efficiently. They are
designed to target common misconceptions in intermediate mechanics and to help you work through them.
(As you may have figured out, to really understand physics, it is insufficient to simply listen to a clear
explanation; you need to think through the physics for yourself.) Initially, tutorials may make you feel more
confused as they challenge your preconceptions. Once you resolve your confusion, however, you will have a
much stronger and more robust mental model for the underlying physics concepts.
What is working in groups good for?
According to Vygotsky (1978), students are capable of performing at higher intellectual levels when
asked to work in collaborative situations than when asked to work individually. Group diversity in terms
of knowledge and experience contributes positively to the learning process. Bruner (1985) contends that
cooperative learning methods improve problem-solving strategies because the students are confronted
with different interpretations of the given situation. The peer support system makes it possible for the
learner to internalize both external knowledge and critical thinking skills and to convert them into tools
for intellectual functioning.
In the present study, the collaborative learning medium provided students with opportunities to
analyze, synthesize, and evaluate ideas cooperatively. The informal setting facilitated discussion and
interaction. This group interaction helped students to learn from each other's scholarship, skills, and
experiences. The students had to go beyond mere statements of opinion by giving reasons for their
judgments and reflecting upon the criteria employed in making these judgments. Thus, each opinion was
subject to careful scrutiny. The ability to admit that one's initial opinion may have been incorrect or
partially flawed was valued.
--Anuradha A. Gokhale, Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking
Another quote:
One thing many people dont realize is that you need to know more than the correct way(s) to do a
problem; you also need to be familiar with many incorrect ways of doing it. Otherwise, when you
come upon a new problem, there may be a number of decent-looking approaches to take, and you wont
be able to immediately weed out the poor ones. Struggling a bit with a problem invariably leads you
down some wrong paths, and this is an essential part of learning. To understand something, you not only
have to know whats right about the right things; you also have to know whats wrong about the wrong
things. Learning takes a serious amount of effort, many wrong turns, and a lot of sweat.
--from David Morins preface
In general, if you work with your classmates, you can get exposed to a lot more wrong turns (and why
theyre wrong) and converge on a correct understanding more quickly than working entirely by yourself.
How well you can explain something to others is also a good test of your own understanding.

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More About Homework

The following is an example of a realistic, successful process to complete a homework assignment:
1) Look at the problems and feel clueless.
2) Look at them again. Realize I can start maybe one or two of the problems.
3) Start them.
4) Get stuck.
5) Come back the next day.
6) Have something dawn on me and realize I can do more of the problem set.
7) Get stuck again.
8) Get together with classmates. Help each other with where we have gotten stuck.
9) As a group, remain stuck on one or two points.
10) Go to office hours.
11) Finish the problem set.
Notice that success requires starting the homework early. Youll get much farther and learn more if you
spend a little time every day on the homework than if you pull an all-nighter right before its due (or worse,
all-nighters right before exams).
When working on homework in groups, be careful about academic honesty and make sure you
understand what counts as plagiarism. If you have questions, ask!
Tips for productive collaboration without risk of plagiarism: (courtesy of William Warren)
Try to make progress on a problem on your own. If you cannot, seek help from other resources to
overcome a specific hurdle, and then try to make further headway on your own. Once you have
solved the problem, be honest with yourself about how much intellectual input came from you, and
try to improve next time. Rewrite the problem solution without reference to any notes, explaining the
steps as you go, as you would to a novice problem-solver. Once you have done this, you will have
generated a unique solution and one that will have taught you something about what you really
understand. Do not be discouraged if you find that some problems require hints and help all the way
through. If you are able to explain previously solved problems coherently, you are making good
progress.
A good test of your understanding is to explain a problem to someone else. Be conscious of your role
in a collaboration. If it is clear that you have mastered the problem and your collaborator is a novice,
limit your help to putting the person on the track to solving the problem alone. Do not give too much
help. Conversely, if you are seeking help from an expert, don't allow the expert to guide you all the
way through. If the exchange is between people of a similar level of understanding, keep challenging
one another, asking questions and providing answers, going beyond the limits of the problem. This is
the fun part of physics - endless discussion about interesting problems! (Please note that I do not
mean to categorize students as weak or strong. Expert and novice can refer to two students of
equal talent and ability - but one happens to have already solved the problem!)
If you find that you have worked on a problem for 1/2 hour without making any progress, it would be
a good idea to stop and seek help.

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