Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Enhancing student feedback

Tomorrow I am giving my first lecture using clickers!
Hopefully, it will all work o.k.
I have included two questions in the lecture on phase transitions
to test student understanding.
A useful resource on the use of clickers has been prepared by the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at University of British Columbia.

3 comments:

  1. Hi! I've been following your blog for a while and, although I'm not a physicist but a computer scientist, I find your general insights about the research and science world to be very interesting!

    Today, however, out of curiosity I clicked on the link to see the slides on your lecture on phase transitions and got very curious about the "chocolate" question/example. I understand that this is not the question you were asking for (i.e. the number of phases in the concentration-temperature graph), but I'm suddenly very curious about this other question: is it at least theoretically possible to turn chocolate into gas? more generally, can any substance (having enough heat and the right pressure) be turned into something we would call a gas?

    Thanks in advance, and sorry for the maybe very basic question!

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  2. Juan,

    thanks for your interest.
    any chemically distinct molecule can be produced in the gas phase if the temperature is high enough and the pressure low enough.
    e.g., a gas of caffeine is possible.
    chocolate contains many different molecules so one would produce a gas mixture of all these molecules.

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  3. Good! Thank you very much for your answer!

    ReplyDelete