Updated April 2017 for the Fall 2017 offering of Phys1035
The official course website is hosted on Moodle, and will be available to you when you register. This page contains a more extensive description of the course and its content.
The course covers energy, where we get it and how we use it. This includes human uses of energy as well as natural pathways for energy on this planet. Energy is fundamental to our existence as living things, and therefore fundamental to our economy, fundamental to our surroundings. This course will cover the physics principles, but touch on all these things too.
The mathematics requirement for this course is high school algebra. But we will be doing a lot of calculations as we apply the fundamental concepts to interesting situations. We will learn quantiatively how to choose between two energy alternatives. It is not one of the conceptual-only science course. That said, the math skills needed (or the math skills you will improve) are high school level and are listed below.
We will ask questions like these. What energy choices do I make personally every day, and why are those my choices? How is energy a cause and effect in natural systems like Lake Superior? Energy-rich countries do strange things compared to energy-poor countries, why? Specific technology today requires energy to be available immediately and in strange ways, how does this work? What will be our energy future? How does energy inputs and outputs play a role in a large and complex system like the planets Venus, Earth, and Mars ? The Duluth region gets energy from multiple sources, which ones are more important now, and which ones will be important in the next fifty years and what are the real costs and benefits? How are cars engineered to achieve higher and higher fuel efficiency standards. How has our understanding of energy changed in the last 200 years?
The course is run in an active learning style. Lectures are short, reading in advance is key, class attendance is required, and class time is spent working on micro-design projects and analyzing and understanding case studies. There are few powerpoint slides, and fewer still multiple choice questions on exams. If you WANT powerpoint slides and multiple choice exams, this is NOT the course for you.
What kinds of math will we be doing? If you are comfortable with the following from high school, or want to ensure you become more skilled at these, then this is the perfect class for you. Adding up the "cost" or "budget" (energy or dollars) and considering which one is a better deal, or better investment. Doing unit conversions, like from kilometers to meters, or from density and volume to mass. Calcuating the area and volume of some common geometry like spheres, circles, rectangles. One-step and two-step algebra problems, to solve for an interesting unknown quantity. One instance of working with an exponential dependence (radioactive decay), one instance of taking something to the fourth power (energy lost from an object depends on temperature). Basically NO trigenometry, and almost never two-equations with two-unknowns, certainly no calculus.
Still not sure? Here are what some people said about the course and instructor at the end of the year, answering specific questions about what was good and bad about the course and instructor.