My Journey Through Physics - Part 1

Well, I had my first week in Physics.

The first day we covered how to write out a lab. Our example involved asking 7 people how far they drove to get to campus. From that information, we determined the mean value, the standard deviation, the percent difference and the percent deviation.

We then talked about accuracy and consistency.

The next day (Thursday) I started out with my first lab.

Our first lab was entitled Phenomenally Flying Discs. It involved throwing a frisbee from a certain spot and measuring its displacement. We had to at least throw the frisbee 13.75 m. We then recorded the displacement and the amount of time it took from when it left the thrower's hand to when it hit the ground.

Each member of our group had to throw the frisbee an equal amount of times, ending with at least 20 sets of data. Since we had 6 people in our group, we had the throw the frisbee 4 times each.

From the data we calculated the velocity, the mean velocity value, the standard deviation, and the percent deviation. I was rather excited because I got to do all of the calculations. They were rather time consuming, but fun none-the-less.

In class, we covered what science is, the Scientific Method, various dimensions and units, and measures of motion. We also briefly about Newton's Second Law of Motion and Albert Einstein's modified Second Law of Motion. We defined scalar and vector quantities as well.

So far, physics has been a blast. I think I'm really going to enjoy it.

The rest of my week:
Physical Geography is proving itself to be more of a joke. I don't think it's going to be much of a challenge at all still, and that is so unfortunate. I did do one of the labs in the lab manual we were assigned and that was fun. We have a quiz on Monday that I'm not expecting to be very difficult.

I had my first Mass Media and Society class. I do believe that class will be very entertaining. Our grade is based on 4 papers that we have 2 weeks each to write. However we are allowed to have as many rewrites as we want, with the last day to turn in rewrites being the penultimate class.

I also got my final and sky journal back from Astronomy. I got 192/200 on the final (I got +5 for my diagrams even though I wasn't looking for it) and 200/200 on the sky journal. He was much more generous on the sky journal than I would have been. The last two pages of our sky journal was meant to be a paper with qualitative and quantitative results. My pages were very small, yet I still only did two pages. I brought it up to the professor and he said I may have only done two small pages, but it had a lot of content and he also looks at that. He said I did very well. I disagree, but that's alright.

I calculated out my grade for Astronomy. It looks like I was 3 points away from 100%. 3 points! I was so close. That's alright, I'll survive.