3 Chem/Phys - Welcome back from Break!!! Finishing up

With hope you all had a fun, restful and healthy spring break, welcome back!!

What's new? What's been fun for you? What time have you been waking up the past week?

As we have at the very least a few more weeks of remote learning, 3 BIG reminders:
1. be checking in with attendance each day with the school; your teachers have no choice but to go by the official list we receive, regardless of whether we see you on Zoom or get emails from you on a given day
2. remember that counselors, social workers, and psychologists are all available if you need anything personally, for college, or any other school matters. 
3. there is the sharing Google Sheet, to give ideas of things to try

AP Details for Mechanics: 
- will be at 11:00 AM on May 11
- 2 problems: the first you will have 25 minutes to read and write your responses (60%), similar to #3 on this AP 1 exam; and a second one you will have 15 minutes (40%).
- you can use a calculator
- just free response, NO multiple choice
- a lot of conceptual understanding will be tested, some calculations/derivations possible. The second one will be to design and analyze a lab experiment on some topic.
- No simple harmonic motion/oscillations, gravity and orbital motions
- Once you submit the first problem you will not be able to go back to it.
- Go Here to get details of any AP exam for this year

Completing the Course:
To hopefully have something a little different and physical, try to do a few of the options in this at-home mini-lab for rotations. Depending what you have available at home, try at least 3 of the options in the lab by the end of Friday, April 17. These are just some fairly simple things to do. For instance, if you happen to have any hard boiled eggs, there is one quick option for those and raw eggs.

Even though it will not be on the AP exam, today just a brief introduction into simple harmonic motion (SHM). The standout example of SHM is something oscillating on a spring. The gist of this will be using F = ma = -kx to give us our one case of a second order differential equation (a is the 2nd derivative of position). Of course, this is different from things we've already done, such as with basic motion or air friction, which have all been first order differential equations that we can do an integral (antiderivative) to solve.

For our 2nd order DE, the solutions for functions of time will be sines and cosines. Hopefully this makes sense, if you want to describe a periodic motion mathematically, we should probably use periodic functions, and those happen to be the solutions to what Newton's 2nd law gives us for a spring.

Relevant Videos: 
Because we won't do all of SHM like we normally would, relevant videos are linked here for those who are interested. For those who have an interest in learning all of SHM, I can do some other examples on Tuesday's 3 pm Zoom session.
- simple harmonic motion, the basics
- SHM more details: initial conditions and phase angle
- simple pendulum and small-angle approximation
- more advanced: SHM for a stick oscillating due to a spring (rotating, oscillating stick)
- a 1-D example of the Schrodinger equation to see where quantum numbers (integers) come from!

Lab: PhET Simulated Experiment for SHM: if you want to vary parameters and see the effects on the oscillations.

There is a simple harmonic motion packet in our SHM folder of the 3 Chem/Phys school web site. There are some recommended practice problems for those who want to try any. These will not be 'assigned' since we won't need them for the AP exam. We will do a couple together as examples, so you can see what all this is about.

AP Review Materials: 
Review sets are all available on the 3 Chem/Phys site. There are three sets to get the basic ideas back for the material that is fair game for this year's AP exam:
AP Review Set I 
AP Review Set II
AP Review Set III 
Each has solutions files available, and we had some of these for the review for the 1st semester final.
All of my videos are here.

And then the AP Exam page. You need to be logged in to your eths202 account to access.

The College Board has online review sessions for all AP courses.