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

Last Thursday I gave the last new topic that we will have in my electricity and magnetism class for a while, until we reach magnetism.

I’m talking about power. That ended the chapter on current and resistance, so from there we went to circuits, where, talking about single loop and multi-loop circuits, we rehashed the concepts we had taken up in the lab starting from two months before: Ohm’s Law, Resistors in Series and Parallel, and Kirchhoff’s Rules.

I gave them the “monster” maze circuit from the book, drawn on the board, and asked them to figure out the current. That was when I reminded them about the “path of least resistance”.

Besides that, we also tried solving a circuit with four connections merging at a junction, instead of the three that we used in the laboratory experiment.

This made them think about the number of loops that can be made from the circuit, since for a three-way junction there are three loops. It wasn’t four, but six.

Maybe next time I’ll ask them to solve for the formula for getting the number of loops from n-way junctions, which is the summation of x as x goes from 1 to n – 1.

Speaking of future tasks, I also plan to give them the infinite number of resistors in parallel problem that our teacher gave us back in college, and which, according to the teacher, only I and one other student from our class was able to solve correctly (and not by inference as most of my classmates).

Back to the multi-loop circuits, I gave them the convention for determining the direction of the loop based on the junction letters that are used in naming them. The order of writing the junction letters gives the direction of the loop whether clockwise or counterclockwise.

I told them that during the exam, they did not have to give all the loops and loop equations, but only enough to be able to solve all the unknown currents, which is equal to the number of equations.

I had to give some special attention to the three students who are in the lecture class but not in the lab class, because they were not versed in these circuit analyses as their classmates were. Fortunately, since this is a relatively easy topic compared to the previous near theoretical discussions, those who are in the lab class were able to guide their classmates through the procedure of solving for the currents so that everyone was able to participate in the board work.

This is something to be doubly proud of (if that can be said about anything) because these classmates of theirs are the ones that even they know are the underachievers, and do not normally follow lectures in one sitting. At least before this, I could only give them credit for still showing up in class. Maybe they will be able to carry something with them to the post-requisite subjects after all.

Still to write about in the next days: the foundation day activities yesterday, and the panelists’ verdict on the College of Computer Science students doing their undergraduate thesis on astronomy software giving their oral defense.

Until then, if there are no more questions, today’s lesson is done.