Getting Yourself Ready to Understand Modeling Applied to Problem Solving

Our prime objective for these lessons is to help you to learn to recognize and answer questions involving Newtonian Mechanics that are real problems for you. We can not teach you to do this - you have to teach yourself! By "teaching yourself" we mean that you to be an active participant in constructing your own knowledge and skill.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this Lesson, you should be able to:

• Describe the strategy behind the letters S.I.M.
• Know roughly what elements constitute a model used for representing the core concepts of mechanics, and that they can be arranged in a hierarchy.
• Explain why you have to be actively involved in the process of learning to apply modeling to solve problems.

Unfortunately, your previous study of physics may have led you to believe that solving physics problems involves mainly plugging into the right formula. If so you need to review the difference between problems and exercises. If you think just memorizing things (e.g. definitions, formulae...) is enough, to enable you to solve real problems, read the section immediately below; if you already realize you have to do more than memorize, then skip it: