What Do I Need To Do Each Week?

The Readings and the Reading Homework

There are readings and a short reading homework to do in preparation for each lecture.

See the explanation on our page, What do I need to do for (and before) each lecture?

The Weekly Homework

The weekly homework is probably the most important activity for your learning in this class.

The weekly homework assignments are found on our Homework Assignment page (link in the nav bar at the top of every page).

Each week (except exam weeks) there will be 4 or 5 problems to be done in your online environment.

The online homework will be worth about 30 points and will be due on Friday of that week at 9 PM.

• You will be able to enter and submit answers multiple times during the week until the deadline.
• For written responses, it's better to write them offline (and save them), copying and pasting them in when ready. This prevents you from having to start from scratch if the online system crashes on you.
• You will not be shown whether your answers are correct until after the final submission deadline. Our goal is to have you learn to decide on your own whether an answer is correct and learning how to work with peers to converge on a correct answer.
• Multiple-choice, numerical, and symbolic answers will be auto-graded by the online system.
• There will also be places to work out something and explain your reasoning. One of those each week will be chosen randomly to be graded by TAs. You will be given full credit for any answer on the others -- therefore DO NOT TAKE receiving full points as an indication your reasoning is right! Be sure to check the posted solution!

Solutions to the homework will be posted on ELMS (in Files) Sunday at noon. No late homework can be accepted after that.

Weekly homework problems are chosen so as to be good ones for working on and discussing with your classmates. You are encouraged to work with others. We have a Course Center (room 0208) set up, where you can find people to work with and get help when you are stuck.

But be careful! If you work together, DO NOT create a common solution and have everyone copy it. Once you have worked out a solution together, each person must write it up separately in their own words. If two solutions are too nearly identical, neither will be given credit. (Sharing your solution is as much a violation as copying.) See our Rules page for the consequences.

Plagiarizing from online or other distributed written solutions is a VERY BAD IDEA. Not only do you miss the opportunity to learn what's going on with the physics, but it's a violation of the honor code. We can Google too! We know where solutions to our problems have made their way to the web (in violation of our copyright) and you will receive a 0 for any that are too close to published solutions. (See our Rules page for the consequences.) If we notice a plagiarizing violation, we will go back to your previous submitted homeworks and check for similar violations and you can lose points previously granted!

Recitation

In recitation, you will work in groups of 3-5 to work out physics problems, often in biological contexts. These will be good preparation for doing the kind of homework problems we assign. Material covered in recitation is fair game for in-class quizzes.

• If you have not purchased a Recitation/Lab manual, please print out a copy of the recitation worksheet to take notes on and keep for studying. Links to the worksheets are at our Recitation/Lab page.
• We expect you to be engaged in and participating constructively in recitation. Your TA will grant 3 points for each recitation you actively participate in.

Laboratories

The labs in this class will let you experience and explore the topics of lecture and recitation in the real world. You also will learn techniques that are directly applicable to living things, for example how to characterize the motion of an object moving under a microscope. We will use software tools that are often used by professional biology and medical researchers -- Excel and ImageJ (a product of NIH often used is bio and medical research).

Our lab experiments are different from traditional "protocol" labs where you are told exactly what to do and expect to get a result that agrees with some theoretical prediction. These are design labs -- labs in which your job is to design and carry out an experiment to answer a question. Most lab experiments will be carried out over two or more weeks.

Lab reports will be done during the lab periods and handed in before you leave the final lab period of an experiment. You should NOT have to do any work for the labs outside of the lab periods. For more details and for the lab handouts, go to our Recitation/Lab page.

Attendance at every lab is required. If you anticipate missing a lab session, try to arrange ahead of time to attend another lab section for that session (for a 1-week lab) or for the entire lab unit (for a 2-week lab). If it is not possible to attend a different lab session, contact your TA as soon as you are aware of your impending absence. Only those with a VALID WRITTEN EXCUSE for missing a lab will be allowed to do a makeup activity at the end of the semester (that will take at least two hours and may involve doing another lab or evaluating data). If you do not have a valid written excuse, you will get a 0 for the week that you missed. You may make up a maximum of two excused absences. If you miss more than two weeks (have more than two 'zeros', i.e., if you miss more than two lab sessions), you may receive an incomplete or a failing grade for the entire class.