Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

I was talking about my Introduction of Electricity and Magnetism lecture class on the first day of the ninth week of classes. I finished all of the topics before going into resistors in series and parallel and Ohm’s Law, which would finally make us in line with the laboratory topics.

For the potential energy of a system of particles, I gave them the formula that showed it was based on every two particles. So if there are three particles, the total potential energy is based on the three relationships between the three particles. For four particles, it is six computations and so on.

Afterwards I divided them by groups again and made them answer the various checkpoints in the text book for determining that they have understood the concepts.

The next day, in my Mathematical Methods One class I discussed the start of Chapter Nine in the textbook, remainder theorem, factor theorem and synthetic division, all shortcuts of topics we have discussed before, which are factoring polynomials and getting solution sets.

In the Science Fiction Literature class for the same day, another group discussed “Liar!” by Isaac Asimov which somehow was also tackled by the previous group. These students went all out on the internet research, because they even used the origins of the meanings of the characters’ names to further explain their motivations.

They also found out an acronym for the name of the robot in the story, H.E.R.B.I.E., which turned out to have been taken from the “Fantastic Four” comic book, who is a completely different robot.

An animated flash program of the outline of the story was presented, up to the end when the robot broke down. No sounds though, the meaning of each “slide” was just explained by the reporters.

The most interesting part of the discussion though was that some students believed the robot could not actually read minds, but they thought it was only very conversant with human actions, reactions and intentions like a program for Twenty Questions dot net that had been years worth of memory to draw from. That is, until I let them read the passage again where it was said the robot just rolled off the assembly line. Someone else suggested it could have evolved in the assembly line though, which seems to contradict the definition of evolution.

All in all, one of the most active and interactive discussions I’ve had in this class. I have to be able to capture those triggers for next time.

And this is the point where session 684 rolls out of the factory. Class dismissed.