Dowd's Physics Class: AP Physics 1

Welcome to Dowd's Physics Class
A ring will always lose to a disk of the same mass and radius, as rotational inertia depends on where the mass is located

A ring will always lose to a disk of the same mass and radius, as rotational inertia depends on where the mass is located

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2018

My name is Tim Dowd, and until 2016 I was the physics teacher at Southmoore. I moved to Connecticut that year and have been teaching at Manchester HS ever since.
I did not teach AP Physics 1 this year, but since I last taught it in 2015-16 I've moved towards a "flipped" classroom, where
video lectures are assigned as homework and class is used for labs and problem solving.

I made this set of materials by combining resources from my current classes at Manchester HS (Honors and AP C) and my former AP 1 class at Southmoore. I know Moore HS has lost its physics teacher this spring, so I wanted to provide these resources for students looking for help. Although I'm in Connecticut and can't play a formal role in helping get all y'all ready, if you have
questions feel free to email me.

The way these materials work is as follows: They're on the website Flickr, which allows me to share photos and videos in order.
Click a link below and it will take you to a title slide for the unit. You can then click forward and backwards, or "back to album"
in order to see the entire album. Most photos have a caption explaining why they matter.

There's also quite a few video lessons interspersed. These won't work well on Flickr, so in the caption, click on the Youtube link to go to the full video.

I strongly recommend you guys get a review book as well, and visit the AP Physics 1 page on AP Central. Take the previous tests under test like conditions, and then grade yourself with the rubrics, constantly asking "why did they do that" and "how will I know to do this?"

The biggest thing you need to do in order to be successful in AP Physics 1 is to practice being able to look at a problem you know nothing about and to think about what kind of problem it is. You need to have strategies to identify when energy is the best, or when momentum is. This is where I think the review book will help, as a source of questions and explanations.

Good luck, and let me know if I can help

One Dimensional Motion / Graphing	We explore the meaning of the slopes of (t,d) graphs and introducing the concept of "area under the curve." We also define some important ideas: position, velocity, and acceleration.
One Dimensional Kinematics & Dynamics	A dimension is something that can be quantified using a number line. We'd usually call it "horizontal" or "vertical" or maybe "the x-axis" or "the y-axis." In this unit we study one dimension at a time. We look at the two most common types of motion, constant acceleration and constant velocity motion. That's all the "kinematics" part. The "dynamics" part is where we introduce the concept of force (a push or pull) and go through Newton's 3 laws for dealing with forces.
Momentum	This concept is useful for helping to understand situations where complex forces are acting, forces that increase and decrease during the interaction. We'll see it is especially helpful for collisions and explosions. There are two main topics: first, where momentum is changed by an outside force, and second, where there are no outside forces and momentum remains constant.
Two Dimensional Kinematics & Dynamics	This unit is really the heart of the course. It is about pushes and pulls in two dimensions. If we can keep track of these, learn to break down forces that act in both dimensions and treat their parts seperately (and according to the Vegas rule) we'll breeze through the rest of the course.
Projectile Motion	In this unit, we work with motion in two dimensions. It's a relatively minor part of the course, but we'll spend a large amount of time on it, because it's the first topic that requires us to organize our thinking. We'll also introduce what I call the Vegas rule: "what happens in horizontal stays in horizontal, and what happens in vertical stays in vertical."
Circular Motion	This is really an extension of 2D forces. Two new concepts are introduced: the centripetal (inward) acceleration that things moving in a circle have to have, and the concept of fictitious forces, which among other things sometimes make us feel like there's a centrifugal (outward) force on us.
Energy	This is the most important unit in the course for helping us be better citizens. It goes through what "doing work" means in physics and discusses what objects or phenomena have the ability to do work. The ability to do work is called energy, and it's the reason energy is so important in our society: if we we want to change our environment, we need energy to do it. It will also be a valuable tool in solving problems that were too difficult to do using the concept of forces.Finally, Power (the "velocity" of energy) is discussed.
Energy & Momentum	In this section we combine the ideas of conservation of momentum and conservation of energy to solve problems. We introduce multi-step problem solving and the idea of "snapshots," little moments in time that help us divide a problem into pieces. The ballistic pendulum is the center of the unit and elastic/inelastic collisions are introduced
Power	In this unit we examine power, the speed of energy
Gravitation and Satellite Motion	This section introduces Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. It uses this new force combined with the ideas of circular motion to help us understand ideas of planetary motion. A complete treatment of planetary motion doesn't come until later in the year, when we study the concepts of energy and momentum.
Rotational Kinematics & Dynamics	Everything we've been studying up to now moves in a linear fashion: up/down, left/right, in/out and every combination thereof. But what about spinning objects? Fortunately, a parallel and very similar set of rules applies to these. This unit is basically a repeat of the entire course, zeroed in on the specific topic of rotation.
Electrostatics	This topic is about how charges can be separated, and how charged objects behave physically. There's a discussion of the electric force (Coulomb's law.) It is a fairly limited treatment of electrostatics- the College Board leaves this to AP Physics 2.
DC Electric Circuits	This unit discusses the kind of electricity that comes from a battery, where charge always flows in one direction. We call the movement of charge current, and since the charge is always going in one direction we call it direct current. Batteries, light bulbs, and resistors are discussed. We discuss Ohm's law for determining current in a branch of a circuit , the equation for power, and Kirchhoff's circuit rules.
Simple Harmonic Motion & Waves	This unit is an introduction to repetitive motion. Objects that regularly move back and forth, either linearly or rotationally, are interesting for many reasons, not least of which is that they can be used as clocks. Simple Harmonic Motion is what you get when how hard the object is pulled back is directly proportional to how far away from the midpoint it is. The unit also discusses how something vibrating in simple harmonic motion can force nearby atoms and molecules to do the same, which can force atoms and molecules near them to do the same, creating a repetitive process that makes a travelling wave. The unit includes mechanical waves and sound waves.

--
This material is being left up in the hopes it will be useful to former students and colleagues. I don't plan on teaching AP 1 during the next few years.

2015-2016
Southmoore HS

to access the entire album for the course, click here

One Dimensional Motion/Graphing	We explore the meaning of the slopes of (t,d) graphs and introducing the concept of "area under the curve." We also define some important ideas: position, velocity, and acceleration.
One Dimensional Kinematics & Dynamics	A dimension is something that can be quantified using a number line. We'd usually call it "horizontal" or "vertical" or maybe "the x-axis" or "the y-axis." In this unit we study one dimension at a time. We look at the two most common types of motion, constant acceleration and constant velocity motion. That's all the "kinematics" part. The "dynamics" part is where we introduce the concept of force (a push or pull) and go through Newton's 3 laws for dealing with forces.
Projectile Motion	In this unit, we work with motion in two dimensions. It's a relatively minor part of the course, but we'll spend a large amount of time on it, because it's the first topic that requires us to organize our thinking. We'll also introduce what I call the Vegas rule: "what happens in horizontal stays in horizontal, and what happens in vertical stays in vertical."
Two Dimensional Kinematics and Dynamics	This unit is really the heart of the course. It is about pushes and pulls in two dimensions. If we can keep track of these, learn to break down forces that act in both dimensions and treat their parts seperately (and according to the Vegas rule) we'll breeze through the rest of the course.
Circular Motion	This is really an extension of the previous unit. Two new concepts are introduced: the centripetal (inward) acceleration that things moving in a circle have to have, and the concept of fictitious forces, which among other things sometimes make us feel like there's a centrifugal (outward) force on us.
Gravitation and Satellite Motion	This section introduces Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. It uses this new force combined with the ideas of circular motion to help us understand ideas of planetary motion. A complete treatment of planetary motion doesn't come until later in the year, when we study the concepts of energy and momentum.
Energy	This is the most important unit in the course for helping us be better citizens. It goes through what "doing work" means in physics and discusses what objects or phenomena have the ability to do work. The ability to do work is called energy, and it's the reason energy is so important in our society: if we we want to change our environment, we need energy to do it. It will also be a valuable tool in solving problems that were too difficult to do using the concept of forces.Finally, Power (the "velocity" of energy) is discussed.
Momentum	This concept is useful for helping to understand situations where complex forces are acting, forces that increase and decrease during the interaction. We'll see it is especially helpful for collisions and explosions. There are two main topics: first, where momentum is changed by an outside force, and second, where there are no outside forces and momentum remains constant.
Electrostatics	This topic is about how charges can be separated, and how charged objects behave physically. There's a discussion of the electric force (Coulomb's law.) It is a fairly limited treatment of electrostatics- the College Board leaves this to AP Physics 2.
Rotational Kinematics and Dynamics	Everything we've been studying up to now moves in a linear fashion: up/down, left/right, in/out and every combination thereof. But what about spinning objects? Fortunately, a parallel and very similar set of rules applies to these. This unit is basically a repeat of the entire course, zeroed in on the specific topic of rotation.
DC Electric Circuits	This unit discusses the kind of electricity that comes from a battery, where charge always flows in one direction. We call the movement of charge current, and since the charge is always going in one direction we call it direct current. Batteries, light bulbs, and resistors are discussed. We discuss Ohm's law for determining current in a branch of a circuit , the equation for power, and Kirchhoff's circuit rules.
Simple Harmonic Motion and Waves	This unit is an introduction to repetitive motion. Objects that regularly move back and forth, either linearly or rotationally, are interesting for many reasons, not least of which is that they can be used as clocks. Simple Harmonic Motion is what you get when how hard the object is pulled back is directly proportional to how far away from the midpoint it is. The unit also discusses how something vibrating in simple harmonic motion can force nearby atoms and molecules to do the same, which can force atoms and molecules near them to do the same, creating a repetitive process that makes a travelling wave. The unit includes mechanical waves and sound waves.
Final Review	These are topics that students wanted to discuss, and labs and review we did leading up to the AP Test.
After the AP Exam	This is the interesting stuff we did after the AP Exam. For 2016, that was mostly about light, with a bit of magnetism thrown in.