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.

Third and last exam for this week culminating the first term was the Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture class, with a relatively smaller coverage compared to the comprehensive lab finals.

Series and parallel resistors was still included, as well as node and loop rule applications, just to show them that they will be dealing with a lot of these in their subsequent subjects, and with more analysis.

I also gave them, less than four hours before the test, several sample problems they could try to solve and verify, particularly the cross product application of forces, velocities and magnetic fields; the same with torque for loops of wire in a magnetic field with the area given.

And there were the summation of magnetic fields at a point from several straight and radial wires, with the direction (in and out of page) given.

In retrospect, I should have allowed them to get the points (literal points, numerical coordinates in three dimensional space) in the area on their own, although it would have been difficult to do outside of the spreadsheet application I used. The same is true with just giving the plane or directions in terms of the three Cartesian axes.

I wasn't surprised that there were still some people during the test who said that the questions weren't the same as in the reviewer. Maybe it was the lack of time for cramming, or they really were looking to be spoon fed.

There was some debacle of some of the students hogging some pages of the reviewer I gave even though others were already photocopied. For a supposedly solid class (or one that has lasted four terms) there is already some tension or exclusion brewing among the group members.

Anyway, I'm planning to give them one more source for extra incentive, building some more robots again from last term, for another high school recruitment exhibition and demonstration this Monday.

Session 1277 may not have practiced solving the sample problems. Class dismissed.