IntroductionKitsWeek 1Week 2Week 3Week 4Week 5Week 6Week 7Week 8Week 9Week 10Week 11Week 12Week 13Week 14Week 15Log of daily class activities: Electric & Magnetic Interactions, Spring 20011Log of daily class activities, E&M Spring 2001This document is a detailed log of what was done each day during Spring 2001, using thetextbook Matter & Interactions II: Electric & Magnetic Interactions, Ruth Chabay andBruce Sherwood, Wiley 2001. The course met every day for 50 minutes. MWF was alarge-group “lecture” and TTh was divided into several small-group “recitations.”The students were science and computer science students. The course was a “semihonors”course with 55 students. Students were encouraged to volunteer for this course rather thanthe regular offering if they had particularly good high school physics preparation and werelooking for additional challenge. Often an “honors” course is very small and very selec-tive, but this course included about one third of the science and computer science studentstaking introductory E&M that semester.The “lectures” were given by Ruth Chabay and incorporated student activities and discus-sion. As they enter the room, students pick up yellow half-sheets with name and section attop. Students work out small problems during lecture, such as Exercises from the text-book. Students turn in the yellow sheets at the end of lecture, which provides attendanceinformation. We also look over the sheets to get a feel for whether most students could dothe activity, but there is no grading of the work. Students may write on the paper that theywould like to have it returned.In the “recitations” students either do computer modeling or they work on problems ingroups of two or three with dry markers on whiteboards. The intent is to give them a widerexperience than just the assigned homework problems, and in a context where there is helpavailable. The broad-tipped markers force large-size writing that makes the work easilyvisible to partners and to instructors wandering around the room checking the work andasking probing questions. If we see a common problem, we occasionally stop the groupwork for a brief general discussion of the issue. In order to provide adequate feedback in aclass of 24 students we have a second person helping the instructor. Often this is a paidundergraduate who did well in the course the previous year and has shown an interest andan ability to assist in this way.We had a lab room with computers on high benches around the periphery, facing inward,which makes it easy for instructors to see what students are doing and whether help isneeded. The high benches make it easier to talk with the students about their computerwork.In the central part of the room are ordinary desks which we arrange roughly in an inward-facing circle for problem work on whiteboards.Log of daily class activities: Electric & Magnetic Interactions, Spring 20012For historical reasons there is no regular lab connected to the course at Carnegie Mellon.Physics majors and some others take a completely separate lab course. However, in thiscourse on E&M there are many just-in-time “desktop” experiments on electrostatics, cir-cuits, and magnetism, for which students have a small experiment kit that accompanies thetextbook.In addition to regularly scheduled class periods, once a week, the night before homeworkwas due, there was an optional two-hour evening workshop. Students were encouraged tocome to the workshop to work on homework problems, often with other students. One ormore instructors were present to answer questions, but the emphasis was on student workin a workshop setting.Log of daily class activities: Electric & Magnetic Interactions, Spring 20013Procurement of desktop experimental kitsAn essential and required component of the course is a desktop experiment kit coveringelectrostatics, circuits, and magnetism. The textbook places heavy emphasis on desktopexperiments which are tightly integrated with the theory.Desktop experiment kits are conveniently available from PASCO (http://www.pasco.com).If however you prefer to assemble your own kits, we offer detailed procurement informa-tion gleaned from an earlier period when we assembled our own kits. Some of this data isprobably invalid by now. We recommend buying kits, because they are of high quality, andit is difficult to procure all of the pieces you need.Each student in our course receives an experiment kit containing the following:• 1 roll of “invisible” tape • 2 D-cell batteries • 1 battery holder • 2 #14 flashlight bulbs • 2 #48 flashlight bulbs • 2 flashlight bulb sockets • 7 jumpers with alligator clips • 2 18-inch (45-cm) lengths of Nichrome wire, #26 and #30 gauge • 1 magnetic compass • 1 6-foot (about 2-meter) length of hookup wire • 1 bar magnet • 1 one-farad capacitor • 1 takeout Chinese-food box (4 in. by 3.5 in. by 4 in.) to hold the equipment The total cost is about $25, and students are charged a lab fee to cover this cost. In otherinstitutional settings one might choose to loan out the kits with no charge to the students.One also needs a small supply of aluminum foil and thread for electrostatics experiments,and unmagnetized iron nails (3 per student) for some magnetism experiments.Invisible tapeFor the electrostatics experiments we use a cheap local drugstore brand of invisible tape.This tape is manufactured by LePage. We got 500-inch tape, a half inch wide, on sale for50 cents. Upper (U) Rite-Aid tape is charged negatively, whereas with Scotch brandMagic(TM) Tape a U tape is charged positively. Each lab period typically consumes half adozen 20-cm (8-in) lengths of tape, so one tape is sufficient for about 10 lab periods.Log of daily class activities: Electric & Magnetic Interactions, Spring 20014Batteries and battery holdersWe bought good-quality Panasonic batteries in quantity from Allied Electronics for 26cents each. We bought Keystone double D-cell battery holders for $1.65 each from AlliedElectronics (catalog 2176).BulbsThe #14 round bulbs draw about 0.3 ampere from two D cells in series. These or equiva-lent bulbs are easy to get from almost any electronic supplier. At Radio Shack they weresold for 50 cents per bulb (in packages of two bulbs). Later we bought them in quantityfrom Allied Electronics for 37 cents each.The #48 long bulbs draw about 0.08 ampere from two D cells in series. These high-resis-tance bulbs are somewhat hard to find. We first