Physics 108:Tutorials

T 10:15-11:05, Reiss 502

Tutorial attendance is mandatory.

We will be using the tutorial materials developed by the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington. These materials are designed to engage you in the type of active intellectual involvement that is necessary for developing a functional understanding of physics. The focus is on mastering concepts rather than on developing quantitative problem solving skills.

The tutorial component of the course consists of three parts:

• Warm-up Exercises
• You will do one set of tutorial warm-up excercises in lecture each week. These warm-ups, which should take 5 to 10 minutes to do, are required, but they will not be graded or returned, and you are not expected to study for them. They are intended to get you started thinking about the subject of the next tutorial, and to help us identify difficulties that you may be having with the material.
• Tutorial
• The tutorials will help improve your understanding of important physics concepts. Generally, but not always, you will have already encountered these concepts in the reading or lectures. During the tutorial session, you will work in groups of four on worksheets. Sometimes you will have some simple demonstration equipment. It is crucial that you talk with your partners and verbalize your ideas as you proceed through the worksheet together. The instructors will help you with the discussions, but they will not necessarily tell you whether you are right or wrong at any given moment. Although this may seem frustrating at first, the purpose is to give you the opportunity to learn how to think like a scientist (scary as that might seem). The worksheets will not be collected or graded, but attendance is mandatory. If you do not have time to complete the worksheet during the scheduled tutorial session, you are strongly urged to finish it on your own, as it will be helpful for doing the tutorial homework./li>

• Homework
• Tutorial homework will be handed out during each tutorial session. It will be due at the beginning of the following session. The tutorial homework will be graded on a scale of 0-3. Only one of the questions will be graded in detail each week. The grading scheme is as follows:
• 0: Did not hand in homework, or did not do the majority of the homework;
• 1: Did not do the graded problem correctly, but attempted most of the homework;
• 2: Did reasonably well on the graded problem, and completed the entire assignment;
• 3: Did the graded problem completely correctly, demonstrating a firm grasp of the underlying concepts, and completed the entire assignment.