Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Modern Physics screencasting update again

This week we're having our first exam. The oral part was yesterday and they did very well. The format is the following:

  • All 5 (yes, I know, only 5) students take the oral together
  • Each student gets 10 minutes to complete a problem on the board.
    • The problems are chosen from homework problems and derivations in the book
    • There are five possible problems so all are done by someone
    • If they get stuck it costs them 5 points (out of a total of 100) to get unstuck by me
  • They then answer one follow up question from each of their classmates.
    • In the end they all ask 4 questions worth 5 points each (if I don't like the question, they don't get the points
Each of the problems that they had to do could be found on Blackboard as a screencast. Four were homework problems that were found under the solutions folder and one was the Bohr derivation that I did as a supplemental material screencast when I covered Bohr.

I gather they studied by watching the screencasts because they did very well. Tomorrow is the written test so we'll see how well they're learning using this approach.