Study Suggestions and Problem Solving

• Keep good notes. Use the text to fill in lecture material. The act of writing material down helps to cement the ideas in your brain.

• You must work problems; this is how you learn physics. Think of it as working out, just like pumping iron (but a lot less repetitive!). As in learning a language, one `gets' the concepts by speaking and not just by listening. You cannot learn to wind-surf by watching videos, and one cannot learn physics without thinking the concepts through. There is more to it even than just becoming facile with the specific concepts: physics is a way of thinking about and approaching the world. One learns this through a kind of apprenticeship approach, familiar to many disciplines.

• There are many many equations. Don't try to remember all of them. Learn a few of the fundamental equations. You may want to keep a summary sheet of these, which will be useful at test time for your "formula sheet".

• If you do not see how to do the job intuitively, then try to follow the recipe below when doing problems:
1. Paraphrase the problem (briefly): write it out in your own terms.
   Do you understand the problem? What's the story line?
   If no, or I don't get it, then ask for assistance especially on tests.
   That's why you are given time in class to do these problems.
2. Draw a diagram and label it. Diagrams are often crucial; problems without diagrams will usually be graded down.
3. Write down what is given and what to find. That's going to be the question.
   This will be a list of values with apprpriate units copied after your numbers. The question is the unknown "?"
4. Write down the relevant formulae. This will be found on your formula sheet.
   Find a formula that contains the letters (symbols) given and the "?" on the formula sheet.
5. Copy down exactly the required formula and if you want,
   this step is optional: Reorganize the formulae to get the desired unknown on the left of the equal sign and the known quantities on the right.
6. Now substitute (just copy) the values into the formula that you have already listed. Do no math, just copy.
7. Solve the equation i.e. do the math. This is when you use the calculator, second to last step.

8. Write the solution with units and put a box around it. Make sure you round off to the correct number of digits.
   Be sure that if you use vectors and scalars properly when writing your final results. Vectors require a direction besides a numerical value.