“Introduction to Physics”

video-course

Featured on physicsdatabase (in June 2015 they were banner-features), as a “great lecture playlist with videos covering such topics as acceleration, Galilean invariance, relativity, Newton’s laws, pendulums and more”.

What distinguishes my approach is the Socratic method of drawing laws of nature (for example Newton’s laws) out of students’ minds through guided classroom discussion rather than presenting it to them directly, and employing a combination of heuristic motivations and pre-lab hands-on experience to arrive heuristically at Hooke’s Law (F = – kx), the ideal gas law (PV = nRT), and relationships such as a = v2/r. (Further description of my approach, and references to videos of my teaching an actual class are included in the accompanying teaching statement.)