REsearchinLearning,Assessing,andinltokxyzk">An experimental physics textbook by the REsearch in Learning, Assessing, and Tutoring Effectively (RELATE
) physics research group at MIT.
David E. Pritchard, Analia Barrantes, and Andrew Pawl
The goal of this electronic textbook is to help you learn a new way to think about Newtonian Mechanics - our Modeling Approach to Problem Solving. The level is introductory university, and we have chosen a WIKI format to allow you to share your insights and questions.
The Modeling Approach to Problem Solving will ask you to:
- Look at the world through the lenses of simple physical models that represent common underlying patterns and interactions in nature.
- Develop a facility in using these models to understand and solve problems with real-world applications - both qualitatively and quantitatively.
- Learn how to check your solutions to problems for reasonableness to develop confidence and to further your understanding.
The form of this textbook, a WIKI, will allow for user contributions in certain areas, and should especially encourage your comments for the authors.
Our second goal is create an electronic WIKItext that is more conducive to learning than a textbook.
We are particularly interested in giving you an overview of Newtonian Mechanics, for which we use a hierarchy and various summaries that effectively arrange the ideas in different orders. We also include a glossary whose entries expand with a click to help you realize that many common words have very specific meanings in science. Printed textbooks do a poor job of giving a grand overview of the material due to their serial nature and lack of an easy search mechanism. This eBook can arrange by lectures (as in a regular textbook), but dedicated users can make other sets of lectures to shift the emphasis or change the level of sophistication.