Angular momentum conservation and moi.
I'm going to try and attempt to articulate my thoughts on completing the first week of FutureLearn's 'The Discovery of The Higgs Boson' MOOC. Before anyone says anything, yes, this is now the start of the second week. What? It's a MOOC I can do it when I want!
You don't need to know the two tries before this were incorrect. LUCK played a big factor. However this leads me onto my first little gripe with this course. Deep end /dt = Chucked2 = Constant.
It hasn't all been bad though, Dr Kristel Torokoff had a fantastic teaching style in her video lectures, emphasising key words and even pausing to provide analogies to simplify key aspects of, for in this instance; An ice-skater spinning in a fixed position with their arms out wide, then pulling their arms in to spin faster. Apparently a perfect analogy for viewing angular momentum conservation. She encouraged thought by pausing again and slowly re-capping the process up until the present, before moving onto the next step.
I found Dr ToroKoff's teaching style much easier to follow and comprehend over the lecturer who went before. I won't mention any names for this is a bad example.
Firstly, the constant swaying of the lecturer in the 10-15m videos was extremely off-putting, not to mention nauseating, and a monotonous tone while describing the apparent 'simple' Newtonian mathematical equations was enough for me drift off into lala land at my desk.
It's interesting that the layout, the colours, the text, where the menu sat made no difference at all to the learning, not for me anyway. Digital nat.. sorry... Digital Resident maybe? I'll probably create a new blog post around this.
Anyway, weirdly though, I scored a higher percentage in the first test than that which followed Dr Torokoff's lecturers :/
It's early days yet and after a shaky start being <-THIS-> close to laughing this course off before Dr Torokoff's lectures pulled me back. I'm hoping for more and I'll update again soon.
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| A simulated event at the Large Hadron Collider. |
I decided to undertake this course for a couple of reasons, to see how FutureLearn have thought about their e-Learning and secondly I'm fascinated by the subject. I've previously read Jim Al-Khalili's 'Quantum' book and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was more of a 'Did you know that..' or 'Isn't it amazing that..' even the 'Still remains unsolved..' sparking intrigue, excitement of what's to come type of book more than anything. The book takes you on a journey through the fundamentals of Newtonian physics, the 'Standard Model' etc without any mathematical knowledge.
This was handy seeing as I have zilch in the way of Maths prowess. It was a brilliant introduction to the sub-atomic world that I lapped up, from a book I hasten to add.
So when the Higgs MOOC caught my eye in the FutureLearn list of offerings, I was pleased to see that hardly any Math knowledge was needed to complete the course. However later during the first test, to my dismay I saw the question-
Conservation Law of some quantity Q means that the quantity Q remains unchanged throughout its motion. This is expressed mathematically as:I did nail it though with a click of a multiple choice answer of dQ/dt=0.
You don't need to know the two tries before this were incorrect. LUCK played a big factor. However this leads me onto my first little gripe with this course. Deep end /dt = Chucked2 = Constant.
It hasn't all been bad though, Dr Kristel Torokoff had a fantastic teaching style in her video lectures, emphasising key words and even pausing to provide analogies to simplify key aspects of, for in this instance; An ice-skater spinning in a fixed position with their arms out wide, then pulling their arms in to spin faster. Apparently a perfect analogy for viewing angular momentum conservation. She encouraged thought by pausing again and slowly re-capping the process up until the present, before moving onto the next step.
I found Dr ToroKoff's teaching style much easier to follow and comprehend over the lecturer who went before. I won't mention any names for this is a bad example.
Firstly, the constant swaying of the lecturer in the 10-15m videos was extremely off-putting, not to mention nauseating, and a monotonous tone while describing the apparent 'simple' Newtonian mathematical equations was enough for me drift off into lala land at my desk.
It's interesting that the layout, the colours, the text, where the menu sat made no difference at all to the learning, not for me anyway. Digital nat.. sorry... Digital Resident maybe? I'll probably create a new blog post around this.
Anyway, weirdly though, I scored a higher percentage in the first test than that which followed Dr Torokoff's lecturers :/
It's early days yet and after a shaky start being <-THIS-> close to laughing this course off before Dr Torokoff's lectures pulled me back. I'm hoping for more and I'll update again soon.
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