Week 1

Newtonian Gravity (Ch. 13)

This week we'll get used to our 'remote learning' course environment. Gravity is a continuation of ideas from Physics 40A, so let's treat this as a warm up before we jump into new topics next week.

We will not be covering Kepler's laws. You can skip sections 13.1 – 13.2 and everything after equation (13.22) in section 13.6.

Lectures

For security, Zoom links to the lectures will be emailed each week using iLearn. Please check your email or iLearn for the links.

• Syllabus discussion (course logistics)

• Tue: Introduction to the Course

• Tue: Overview of chapter 13

• Tue: Example 13.9

• Thu: Mini-lecture (written stuff)

• Thu: Addendum: gravitational potential energy from work arguments (written stuff)

Life pro tip: watch the videos at 1.5x speed and just pause as needed when you want to think about something. Life is short, my friends.

Homework

Sign Into the Slack Workspace

In the Week 1 email there is a link to the Slack workspace. Please sign into the Slack workspace as a useful platform to discuss the class.

Quick Survey(s)

This week there are three surveys!

• Quick Survey 1 (due Wednesday)

• Remote Learning Survey (by Friday)

• Pre-Class Survey (by Friday)

The last two surveys are optional, but as a personal favor I ask that you do them. They will help us make Physics 40B a better class now and in future offerings.

Explainer Videos

• Submit your videos using this form (due Monday)

• For this week only: please create an additional few minute video introducing yourself to the class. Submit the video here. (due Monday) Here's a sample video from Prof. Tanedo (from a class last quarter).

You will be assigned one five minute explainer video (see the assignments below). You are responsible for recording the video and uploading to Google Drive or YouTube. You can restrict access to the video; e.g. unlisted on YouTube or only shared to UCR accounts with the link on Google Drive. You can find instructions for recording yourself on keeplearing.ucr.edu.

Your target audience are other students in this class and the goal is that after watching your video, your classmates should be able to solve any problem like the one you were given. In your video, you will need to:

1. State the problem clearly.

2. Draw a figure (as necessary) and explain how it describes the problem.

3. Articulate your strategy and the steps you're taking.

4. Explain key intermediate results. Five minutes may be too short to do all of the math "on screen," but you should provide enough information so that anyone watching your video can straightforwardly reproduce all of your steps. (You explain the thinking, they can do the arithmetic on their own.)

5. Provide context. This is how your explainer video differs from being just a solution. Point out potential mistakes, give examples, justify why answers make sense, highlight any neat tricks. You could relate the ideas to lecture or to other ideas. (This is how we ended up talking about Naruto a lot last year...)

Stay within time (a few seconds over is okay). If you go over time too much you'll be penalized. It can be challenging to decide what you keep and what you cut in your videos!

You will be graded by your peers according to this rubric.

Examples explainer videos from Spring 2020 (shared with students' permission):

• Nathan Sanchez

• Armando Avelar

• Megan Woodall

• Aidan Lopez

Peer Reviews

No peer reviews this week, they will begin next week.

Interviews

No interviews this week.

Mastering Physics

No Mastering Physics this week, but please make sure that you have a Mastering Physics account and can access our course.

• Our course id is tanedo18896.

• Instructions to log into Mastering Physics.

Explainer Video Assignments

For the first week, we your explainer problem will be based on your discussion section number. All problems are from Knight chapter 13; they are reproduced here for your convenience.