Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In my electricity and magnetism lecture class I finished the chapter on capacitance by giving them the equations for dielectrics, insulating materials between the parallel plates that change the capacitance from air or a vacuum medium.

After that I started on the next chapter, current and resistance, which I basically skimmed through because of their familiarity with the topic from our lab experiments. The only new concepts I introduced in that chapter are current density and resistivity, since they already know Ohm’s Law and Kirchhoff’s Node Rule. And I stopped there, following the pattern we’ve developed the last few lectures of filling the whole chalkboards once per meeting with notes, then proceeding with the examples that apply those concepts.

I gave them one example of several wires in a partial circuit meeting at five nodes, with the current values and directions shown for most of the wires, but not all. From there they were supposed to determine the magnitude and direction of the current at one end of the circuit.

One student got it, having taken up electricity before in his technical high school (and he taught the correct analysis to two of his classmates), but my cousin was not able to deduce it properly. I’m sure though, that after I showed them how to solve for it, that they will all be able to solve it now.

Since I also introduced the equation for resistivity relating it to potential difference, current, electric field, length and cross-sectional area of the wire, I gave them an application that asked for the ratio of certain quantities if the other values were constant. There were also two examples that dealt with the diameter of the wire, which is only needs to be applied to getting the area of a wire before becoming direct substitution again.

The last example I gave them dealt with current as being charge over time, and made them recall that charge is an integer number of electrons passing through a certain point in the conductor.

It will be all downhill from here, as we delve into proven ground.

After my class we had another meeting for the Interactive Science campus, where the Executive Vice President and Dean had chosen about a dozen projects from the fifty plus that I listed last time, which isn’t good because just talking about it, I was able to come up with another half-dozen possible displays, including fractals and magnetic fields.

David got assigned to do the computer interfaced motion detectors that will be able to measure the speed of runners, with applications in their P.E. classes.

The “Kids, Try This At Home” simple experiments posters was shelved for now, but at least there is already a proposal for the science demonstration contest, like the one I judged in St. Scholastica’s College last year, and there is already a plan to visit some of the nearby discovery workshops and museums. And the “scientist of the week” bulletin board will get all the students involved as one group can be assigned one week out of the more than thirty school weeks left to come up with one display each.

The next few weeks ahead just got very interesting.