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.

In the first day of the seventh week of classes for the second term, we had the third experiment in my mechanics lab session. This was Projectile Motion.

Sadly, for this class, all my tactics (and those of my other co-teachers) for trying to get the students to read the manual before the class, as well as going to class on time for the regular quiz, do not seem to be working.

The students of this class still take at least two hours in finishing the measurements of their experiment, and this isn’t even because of the underhanded method of computing immediately after measuring something then measuring again if they find out that the percentage error is not acceptable by their standards. And there are still some students who still ask questions about the procedure despite all the preliminary instructions I give and the explicit instructions in their manual.

In related news, the girl who wanted to move to another group was asked by one of her “former” group mates, who surprisingly arrived early this time, to help him out.

There were some students who complained about their scores in the previous group reports, when in fact, these people submitted them a week late and thus had up to fifty percent deduction to their original marks.

One group, in fact, was only going to submit one of their group reports on that day, which meant that it was two weeks late and thus had a hundred percent deduction. But because of the peculiar nature of the course, they still had to submit it for the purpose of getting complete requirements, even though they already knew its grade would be zero.

This same group, regrettably, had the great idea of placing a piece of tape between their projection board and the table so as not to add to the errors they might get in their computation.

Alternately, the group with the girl that I mentioned above moved their projection or plotting board every time she got three marks of data, because, she said, she had measured already the distance from the ramp to the board and thus could recreate the original position if needed. Not necessarily, she only measured one dimension but the table top has two degrees of freedom in two dimensions. So I’m still guessing on errors in their computations.

Another alteration to the prescribed procedure that the students made (not really frowned upon, this one) is that they let the ball roll from all the horizontal distances first, before projecting to the plotting board and measuring.

I will have to finish this tale next time though. Session 823 already has large errors. Class dismissed.