{"id":9991,"date":"2015-04-01T10:12:19","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T14:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9991"},"modified":"2015-04-01T10:12:19","modified_gmt":"2015-04-01T14:12:19","slug":"course-report-brief-history-of-timekeeping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/04\/01\/course-report-brief-history-of-timekeeping\/","title":{"rendered":"Course Report: Brief History of Timekeeping"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I taught one of our “SRS” classes, which are supposed to introduce students to research at the college level– I blogged about it<\/a> while the course was in progress. I taught it again in the recently-concluded Winter term, but didn’t blog much about it because I was mostly doing the same stuff as last time. I did re-adjust the content a little, as I’ve changed some things about the way I like to present stuff since 2012, but they were mostly cosmetic tweaks, with one big exception.<\/p>\n

In the previous round, I went with the base course description, which just specifies that students must write a research paper, and ended up getting 17 library research papers. Most of which were very well done, but there’s only so many library research papers I can read. This time, having had a number of arguments about whether this is really<\/em> a “research methods” course, I opted instead to require final projects. Since I’m a scientist, and science is about empirical measurements of things, I insisted that every student had to select a project related to timekeeping in which they made an empirical measurement of… something related to timekeeping.<\/p>\n

I was a little nervous about this, because it’s a slightly unusual kind of assignment, and I wasn’t sure how it would go over. And I was also slightly concerned that I would get a dozen variants of experiments we did or discussed in class. But, on the whole, I was extremely impressed with both the quality and the range of the projects I got.<\/p>\n

The “featured image” up top (and reproduced below for the RSS crowd) shows a few snapshots from the final papers, showing some of my favorite results. On the left, we have a student who decided to test the performance of different materials for a sandglass, who saw a mention of powdered eggshell as a material in one of the papers we read in class, and made powdered eggshells<\/em> to test (which turns out to be a multi-step process…). In the center, we have a homemade water wheel clock, with two reservoirs using an overflow system to maintain a constant level in the second, and the outflow from that powering a wheel whose time he tracked. And on the right, we have a plastic pendulum constructed by a woman who chose to take advantage of this awful winter’s weather, to measure the effect of thermal expansion on the period by recording the period indoors and outside on a bitter cold day.<\/p>\n

\"Student<\/a>
Student projects from my SRS (L to R): Measuring the flow of powdered eggshell in a “sand timer,” a homemade water wheel clock, and a pendulum to measure the effect of thermal expansion.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not pictured are another water clock, an analog metronome, a guy who compared three quartz watches at different temperatures, and another guy who bought a mechanical pocket watch and tracked its performance. We did have several sundials, but those were generally well-done as well, and each of the students working with sundials found a unique approach.<\/p>\n

So, on the whole, a very positive experience. Five stars, would do again. I don’t know how this will play out in terms of course comments from the students– those are held up for a couple of weeks because computers– but a couple of the students did append nice notes with their final papers saying “Thanks for having us build something, I really enjoyed it.” And as a faculty member, that’s a great feeling.<\/p>\n

This term, I’m teaching intro calculus-based classical mechanics for the first time in a few years; two sections of it, no less. Which is going to be grueling, but there’s a sabbatical waiting at the end of it, so I’ll get through…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I taught one of our “SRS” classes, which are supposed to introduce students to research at the college level– I blogged about it while the course was in progress. I taught it again in the recently-concluded Winter term, but didn’t blog much about it because I was mostly doing the same… Continue reading Course Report: Brief History of Timekeeping<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,134,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia","category-course_reports","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}