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COURSE OUTLINE
We cover the standard topics in an introductory college level mechanics
course including all topics in the College Boards Advanced Placement Course
Physics-C Mechanics. We place a strong emphasis on helping you understand
how these concepts interrelate and how to use this understanding to analyze
and solve problems where several concepts apply.
Our emphasis on overview rather than basic formulas and procedures means
that you will find our course much easier if you already have exposure to
and familiarity with some of the core concepts: Newtons laws, momentum,
energy, and ideally a bit of rotation and/or angular momentum.
This course has been composed by Prof. Dave Pritchard and his education
research group: REsearch in Learning Assessing and Tutoring Effectively
(http://RELATE.MIT.edu). It embodies our Modeling Applied to Problem
Solving (MAPS) pedagogical approach.
We now briefly summarize the central ideas and approach of this course.
These ideas provide a framework with which to categorize the core concepts.
Mechanical Energy
These basic descriptions are fundamental organizing principles of mechanics,
and they underlie the Core Models used in our MAPS (Modeling Applied to
Problem Solving) approach to mechanics.
These motion variables will remain constant if the system experiences no
interactions. Newtons First Law is an example of this that the velocity of a
point particle will remain constant if no forces act on it. Angular Momentum
about some axis will remain constant if there is not external torque about
that axis.
In this course the core physical models involve systems composed of one or
more particles or solid bodies (the structure), and describe how forces
change some physical variable like the momentum (the behavior). For
example, the momentum model describes how external forces change the
momentum of a collection of particles.
The solution to a physical problem is also a physical model, with attendant
simplifications and assumptions. Often it will contain one or more core
physical models.
OVERVIEW OF MAPS
Modeling Applied to Problem Solving (MAPS) organizes the standard
mechanics syllabus under five core models: dynamics, momentum, energy,
rotational dynamics, and angular momentum each distinguished by the
variable used to describe the motion. Each model is restricted to systems
containing only certain types of objects, and only certain aspects of the
forces change the motion variable of that model.