HOW THINGS WORK

Designing a Course


While How Things Work is actually a relatively straightforward and satisfying course to teach, my experience with it over the past nine years has taught me a few lessons that I’ll pass along.

1. There is much more to this course than just teaching physics. If you concentrate less on trying to cover all of physics and more on trying to prepare your students for life in the physical world, the students will find it a much more valuable experience. That’s because, while few of them will become physicists, all of them will have to make decisions involving technological and scientific issues. Moreover, the students are far more curious about the objects in their world than they are about physics itself. If you make the effort to reach out to them and teach them what they want to learn, they’ll learn the physics, too, and even enjoy learning it.

2. Try to illustrate the book with demonstrations. Words, drawings, and photographs can only go so far in helping the students to understand the concepts of physics. The next step is for the students to see those concepts in action. Many students have told me that they are “visual learners” and that seeing physical concepts demonstrated dramatically enhances their abilities to understand and retain those concepts. That’s why it’s so important to show the concepts in class with demonstrations. While it might be even more effective to have the students perform the demonstrations themselves as an official laboratory, good demonstrations with familiar objects will provide enough insight for most students. However, the course should use the real world as its unofficial laboratory—if the equipment is simple enough, the more motivated students will try some of the demonstrations themselves. Encourage the students to experiment with the world around them.

3. Encourage the students to ask questions. Many of the objects discussed in How Things Work are ones that students naturally wonder about and even the most science-phobic of them will have questions they’d like to ask. Encourage them to ask those questions. For example, they’ll want to know why you’re not supposed to put metal in a microwave oven or why halogen light bulbs are supposed to be better than normal bulbs. These question are non-threatening to science-phobic students because they don’t appear to involve physics. But because the answers do involve physics, these questions provide a perfect vehicle with which to give science-phobic people an understanding of physics without scaring them away from it.

4. Try to keep the physics in context, rather than making it abstract principles. While mature physicists may be comfortable dealing with the basic laws of physics as abstract principles, separated from the situations in which they apply, beginning students of physics will not experience such comfort. It’s hard enough for these students to follow the principles if they can’t see what’s happening; it’s harder still if they don’t even have a real situation to imagine. You can help them enormously by keeping an object or a real situation in mind as you and the students discuss physical concepts. While it might seem that such specificity will weaken the students’ abilities to generalize principles, the students can’t begin to generalize something if they don’t understand it at all. A related observation is that going off on a tangent about things that are related only by physical principles is much more interesting to physicists than it is to beginning physics students. The students usually don’t see the connections and quickly get lost.

5. Try to demystify physics and objects whenever possible. There are natural tendencies among physicists to revel in the beautiful simplicity of the physical laws and to celebrate the great complexity of the objects that are based on them. Both of these tendencies are appropriate for How Things Work. With time and practice, the students may develop those same tendencies, too. However, it is not appropriate for an instructor to revel in the great complexity of the physical laws or to celebrate the beautiful simplicity of the objects that are based on them—in other words, avoid “blowing away” the audience. An instructor who, consciously or unconsciously, goes about proving that physics is too complicated for mere mortals or who claims that objects are all simple in the eyes of a seasoned physicist, may be respected and feared by students but won’t teach them very much. The course should bring the instructor and students closer together, not separate them further. That is why demystification is so important. How Things Work is about giving away as many trade secrets as possible.

6. Don’t be afraid to skip topics. Most students will take How Things Work as a first and last course in physics. Because you aren’t preparing these students to be physicists, their exposure to physics doesn’t have to be comprehensive. It’s more important that they learn to see the roles of physics and science in their world, and that they learn to think physically, than it is that they learn every physics concept.  If you try to cover too much, the students won’t learn more; they’ll just get frustrated and confused.

Covering the entire book requires two semesters. The book can be used to teach a full year course or, as I have done at UVA, to teach two independent one-semester courses. Both formats are discussed below. However, most instructors will want to offer How Things Work as a single one-semester course. This can easily be done by being selective—keeping some topics and skipping others. If you choose this format, you will have to take shortcuts through the book.

The book is structured in a way that should make these shortcuts easy. The chapters and sections are written to be relatively independent of one another so that it’s often possible to skip the final section(s) in a chapter or even entire chapters without damaging the flow of the course. The students will still learn a considerable range of physics concepts, but their exposure will be somewhat less complete.

Suggested Courses

Here are a few suggested paths through the book. They are certainly not the only paths that will produce a successful course. Given that this course is probably the only physics course your students will take, you can’t really go too far wrong in choosing which topics to keep and which to omit. It’s mostly a matter of taste—yours and your students’. I have found that between 22 and 28 topics is enough to keep the class busy for a semester. In the following suggestions, I have kept the number of topics in that range.

1. Full Year Course: If you have a full year to work with, you can cover the entire book from cover to cover and probably include a few topics from the web as well. This path will leave the fewest possible holes and give the students a relatively complete picture of the physics in their everyday world.

2. One Semester on Mechanics, Fluids, Heat, and Resonance: This is the course that I teach in the fall at UVA and it follows Chapters 1 through 7 in order. It is a relatively straightforward course because its topics are the least abstract and therefore the most accessible to students—they can easily visualize what is happening on a roller coaster, in a wood stove, or on a violin string.

Chapter 1.  The Laws of Motion (Part 1)

1.1  Skating

1.2  Falling Balls

1.3  Ramps

Chapter 2.  The Laws of Motion (Part 2)

1.1  Seesaws

1.2  Wheels

1.3  Bumper Cars

Chapter 3.  Simple Mechanical Objects

3.1  Spring Scales

3.2  Bouncing Balls

3.3  Carousels and Roller Coasters

3.4  Bicycles

Chapter 4.  Fluids

4.1  Balloons

4.2  Water Distribution

Chapter 5.  Fluids and Motion

5.1  Garden Watering

5.2  Balls and Frisbees

5.3  Airplanes and Rockets

Chapter 6.  Heat and Thermodynamics

6.1  Wood Stoves

6.2  Incandescent Light Bulbs

6.3  Air Conditioners

6.4  Automobiles

Chapter 7.  Resonance and Mechanical Waves

7.1  Clocks

7.2  Violins and Pipe Organs

7.3  The Sea and Surfing

Chapter 15.  Phase Transitions (on Web)

15.1  Water, Steam, and Ice (on Web)

3. One Semester on Electricity and Magnetism, Light, Materials Science, Nuclear Physics, and Modern Physics: This is the course that I teach in the spring at UVA and it begins with Chapter 1 and 2, and then continues with Chapters 8 through 14 in order. It is a more challenging course because its topics are relatively abstract and complicated—the students can’t see current or electric and magnetic fields, and they have no direct experience with nuclear power plants. However, this course also deals with topics that interest the students the most: they are fascinated by televisions, microwave ovens, tape recorders, computers, lasers, and compact disc players, and they are concerned about nuclear weapons and reactors. If you allot two class periods to the topics marked with pluses on the flowchart, the course will cover 29 topics in 35 class periods.

Chapter 1.  The Laws of Motion (Part 1)

1.1  Skating

1.2  Falling Balls

1.3  Ramps

Chapter 2.  The Laws of Motion (Part 2)

1.1  Seesaws

1.2  Wheels

1.3  Bumper Cars

Chapter 8.  Electric and Magnetic Forces

8.1  Electronic Air Cleaners

8.2  Xerographic Copiers

8.3  Magnetically Levitated Trains

Chapter 9.  Electrodynamics

9.1  Flashlights

9.2  Electric Power Distribution

9.3  Tape Recorders

Chapter 10.  Electronics

10.1  Audio Amplifiers

10.2  Computers

Chapter 11.  Electromagnetic Waves

11.1  Radio

11.2  Television

11.3  Microwave Ovens

Chapter 12.  Light

12.1  Sunlight

12.2  Fluorescent Lamps

12.3  Lasers

Chapter 13.  Optics

13.1  Cameras

13.2  Optical Recording and Communications

Chapter 14.  Modern Physics

14.1  Nuclear Weapons

14.2  Medical Imaging and Radiation

4. One Semester Broad Survey: Covering a wide range of physics topics demands that you be very selective. Here is a list of sections that will give the students a broad introduction to physics. It is probably too long to do in one semester, so you should drop a couple of topics that seem less important to you or your students.

Chapter 1.  The Laws of Motion (Part 1)

1.1  Skating

1.2  Falling Balls

1.3  Ramps

Chapter 2.  The Laws of Motion (Part 2)

1.1  Seesaws

1.2  Wheels

1.3  Bumper Cars

Chapter 3.  Simple Mechanical Objects

3.1  Spring Scales

3.2  Bouncing Balls

3.3  Carousels and Roller Coasters

Chapter 4.  Fluids

4.1  Balloons

Chapter 5.  Fluids and Motion

5.3  Rockets (omit Airplanes)

Chapter 6.  Heat and Thermodynamics

6.1  Wood Stoves

6.2  Incandescent Light Bulbs

6.3  Air Conditioners

6.4  Automobiles

Chapter 15.  Phase Transitions

15.1  Water, Steam, and Ice

Chapter 7.  Resonance

7.1  Clocks

7.2  Violins and Pipe Organs

7.3  The Sea and Surfing

Chapter 8.  Electric and Magnetic Forces

8.1  Electronic Air Cleaners

8.2  Xerographic Copiers

8.3  Magnetically Levitated Trains

Chapter 9.  Electrodynamics

9.1  Flashlights

9.2  Electric Power Distribution

Chapter 11.  Electromagnetic Waves

11.1  Radio

Chapter 12.  Light

12.1  Sunlight

Chapter 13.  Optics

13.1  Cameras

Chapter 14.  Modern Physics

14.1  Nuclear Weapons

14.2  Medical Imaging and Radiation

5. One Semester Survey of the Physics of High Technology: Here is a list of sections that will give the students an introduction to the physics of high technology. This list is probably too long for a semester—perhaps the easiest way to shorten it would be to omit Chapter 16.

Chapter 1.  The Laws of Motion (Part 1)

1.1  Skating

1.2  Falling Balls

1.3  Ramps

Chapter 2.  The Laws of Motion (Part 2)

1.1  Seesaws

1.2  Wheels

1.3  Bumper Cars

Chapter 3.  Simple Mechanical Objects

3.1  Spring Scales

Chapter 6.  Heat and Thermodynamics

6.1  Wood Stoves

6.2  Incandescent Light Bulbs

Chapter 7.  Resonance

7.1  Clocks

Chapter 8.  Electric and Magnetic Forces

8.1  Electronic Air Cleaners

8.2  Xerographic Copiers

8.3  Magnetically Levitated Trains

Chapter 9.  Electrodynamics

9.1  Flashlights

9.2  Electric Power Distribution

9.3  Tape Recorders

Chapter 10.  Electronics

10.1  Audio Amplifiers

10.2  Computers

Chapter 11.  Electromagnetic Waves

11.1  Radio

11.2  Television

11.3  Microwave Ovens

Chapter 12.  Light

12.1  Sunlight

12.2  Fluorescent Lamps

12.3  Lasers

Chapter 13.  Optics

13.1  Cameras

13.2  Optical Recording and Communications

Chapter 16.  Material Science

16.1  Knives and Steel

16.2  Windows and Glass

16.3  Plastics

Chapter 14.  Modern Physics

14.1  Nuclear Weapons

14.2  Medical Imaging and Radiation

6. One Semester Survey of the Physics of Sound and Light: Here is a list of sections that will give the students an introduction to the physics of sound and light, along with their applications in such objects as tape recorders and televisions.

Chapter 1.  The Laws of Motion (Part 1)

1.1  Skating

1.2  Falling Balls

1.3  Ramps

Chapter 2.  The Laws of Motion (Part 2)

1.1  Seesaws

1.2  Wheels

1.3  Bumper Cars

Chapter 3.  Simple Mechanical Objects

3.1  Spring Scales

Chapter 4.  Fluids

4.1  Balloons

4.2  Water Distribution

Chapter 5.  Fluids and Motion

5.1  Garden Watering

Chapter 7.  Resonance and Mechanical Waves

7.1  Clocks

7.2  Violins and Pipe Organs

7.3  The Sea and Surfing

Chapter 8.  Electric and Magnetic Forces

8.1  Electronic Air Cleaners

8.2  Xerographic Copiers

8.3  Magnetically Levitated Trains

Chapter 9.  Electrodynamics

9.1  Flashlights

9.2  Electric Power Distribution

9.3  Tape Recorders

Chapter 10.  Electronics

10.1  Audio Amplifiers

Chapter 11.  Electromagnetic Waves

11.1  Radio

11.2  Television

Chapter 12.  Light

12.1  Sunlight

12.2  Fluorescent Lamps

12.3  Lasers

Chapter 13.  Optics

13.1  Cameras

13.2  Optical Recording and Communications



7. One Semester Survey of the Physics of Transportation: Here is a list of sections that will give the students an introduction to the physics involved in transportation.

Chapter 1.  The Laws of Motion (Part 1)

1.1  Skating

1.2  Falling Balls

1.3  Ramps

Chapter 2.  The Laws of Motion (Part 2)

1.1  Seesaws

1.2  Wheels

1.3  Bumper Cars

Chapter 3.  Simple Mechanical Objects

3.1  Spring Scales

3.2  Bouncing Balls

3.3  Carousels and Roller Coasters

3.4  Bicycles

Chapter 4.  Fluids

4.1  Balloons

4.2  Water Distribution

4.3  Elevators

Chapter 5.  Fluids and Motion

5.1  Garden Watering

5.2  Balls and Frisbees

5.3  Airplanes and Rockets

Chapter 6.  Heat and Thermodynamics

6.1  Wood Stoves

6.3  Air Conditioners

6.4  Automobiles

Chapter 8.  Electric and Magnetic Forces

8.1  Electronic Air Cleaners

8.2  Xerographic Copiers

8.3  Magnetically Levitated Trains

Chapter 9.  Electrodynamics

9.1  Flashlights

9.2  Electric Power Distribution

9.5  Electric Motors

Chapter 16.  Material Science

16.1  Knives and Steel

16.2  Windows and Glass

16.3  Plastics

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