Teach Fzx Tuesday - Waste Paper

We often tell our children conflicting stories.

          "Clean your plate for the starving people in North Korea."

          "But Dad, why don't you send some of your food to those kids?  You're too fat anyway."

Food discussions, however, only affect learning if the kid's starving so here's another:

          "Save the trees" by conserving paper.

          "Show all your work" in your algebra problem.

That one has definitely caused me grief

Freaky Fzx Friday - Protons Neutrons Quarks

We covered SPLITTING THE ATOM  and SPLITTING THE NUCLEUS in December.  A nucleus is made of protons and neutrons and this is how we normally imagine it to be.

As with everything else in physics, the reality is much more complicated.

Teach Fzx Tuesday - Geometric Momentum Problems

Two dimensional conservation of momentum problems are complicated.  For the conceptual physics student, even one dimensional momentum problems are often too complicated.  So I came up with an easier method.  Here's an example.

First we sketch before and after the collision.  That's the normal part.

Teach Fzx Tuesday - Struggle

We fail.  On rare occasions we fail because we're just not smart enough.  Mostly we fail since we don't have the desire and persistence to complete the task.  And let's be honest, persistence is a learned skill.

I was at a friend's house years ago and his firstborn was three.  He was walking and talking but he wasn't building - Dad wouldn't let him use those MegaBlocks alone.  Kid said "Dad, could you build a house?"  So Dad built a house.  It was obvious that Dad did the building and Son did the requesting and the watching.  Trained to be passive.

Fzx in Action - Vacuum Fix

The sweeper part of the canister vac had a bad connection.  My wife found it, pointed it out, and asked me to fix it.

Freaky Fzx Friday - Quantum Tunneling

Here's the family atop Rocky Mountain National Park in 2012.

LittleBoy was only 9 months old.

Accelerate Safely - net force and time for collisions

We take our first form of Newton's Second Law of Motion and modify it.

It's still the 2nd Law but a different look. Newton found that momentum is an important quantity so we express it in terms of "Net Impulse" and "Change in Momentum."