August 27

This post is for August 27, 2010 Friday

Order of magnitude:

For the first part of class we were given questions such as guessing the amount of people present today and a second one which had us guess the number of people that we can fit in the largest office building in the world.

The fact that I have internet access on my phone (3G baby . . time to upgrade professor mason Edge = no bueno) it was why we were able to find that the pentagon was the largest office building and that within one meter square we are able to fit 10 people easily. The objective overall is to allow us to understand the idea of order of magnitude. The idea of looking at every problem that we are faced and have a general idea of what the right answer should be within a specific range.

Vectors:

Topic of vectors were put into practice and i swear i would have had the answer right but i infact had my calculator in radian mode which was why our answer was off ( so dont make that mistake) but the way to go about is to draw a picture and to find the components of each vector and after you can add the components and there you would have the resultant vector and with the tangent inverse of that one will be able to find the angle of that vector and if you take the pythagorean theorm you would be able to find the length of that vector. Always remember with vectors you must keep track of your directions because the SIGNS matter.
Be sure to draw tables also cuz its what professor mason likes when dealing with vectors.

Vpython:

I would have to say before coming into this class i was advised that it would have consisted of a lot of programing and that acctually scared me. However after seeing the program and thankfully i brought my lap top (for those who have bring so you do not have to use the Macs at school cuz im a windows guy). This is acctually interesting enough that i was awake throughout the whole class. (Went to bed around 3 cuz i procrastinated with the lab ) but ya over all the information about the vpython is all listed in the posts before and as you follow the lab manual you go through a series of trials of how the ball bounces back and forth. And of course there are more to it. Objective is to box the ball and to allow the ball to bounce and to also enter gravity to see how it would affect the design.

No due dead line of this is due however it is recommended that you give honest effort in trying to program the following so when we really start programming later on we would at least have some idea of how to go about instead of figuring it out later. Play around with it because it is pretty much a new language that we are learning. (Caps and no caps matter ) ex. when i wrote WallR and the second time i wrote wallR the fact that the caps were off threw me off from running the program for a good period of time. On top of spaces and indents.

Prelab: Soap Box Derby

prelab that is due on monday. Follow the prelab pages that is also posted on the previous posts by professor mason. Read on page 25 on lab manual and understand the lab that we will be doing on monday and write your predictions and with the method questions they will be used to help you with your predictions and should give you a good understanding of what we will be facing on monday. I never liked labs but after doing 30 labs in chemistry i can honestly say it is KEY to read it before going into class. Each lab that i give at least 20 or 30 min to just read and try to think of how we will be doing the lab only made it easier as we see it in class so it is not a big suprise.

Comments:

Remember class the sucess of this class depends on how we all work together as a team. Dont you guys think its pretty cool that we meet new group partners everyday? before we know it we will know everyone in class and constructively help each other pass this intensive class. So i am looking forward in meeting everyone of you as well. In addition, out of all the teachers that i have met i am thankful that professor mason does not allow us to take notes lol ( that only means we have to be more hands on though)

Anyways, I hope this post is useful if not find me personally i'll try my best to clear up what i can. Hope you all have a good weekend and have fun programming.

- Joe