Resources for the Course

Welcome to our Resources Page! Here we will explain to you what kind of additional help you can get to learn the concepts covered in this course. There are no official texts that are required. Several published texts which could be helpful are given below, but we shall primarily utilize resources which are freely available on the Internet.

Philosophy of Resources Used

In traditional courses, you normally learn by listening to explanations by your teachers, reading a prescribed textbook, doing homework problems and taking exams.

In this online course, we will ask you to take a more active role in your learning, by working closely with your classmates over the Internet, asking them questions and also answering their questions. We think that you will find this way of learning very effective and also a lot of fun.

You can take this course completely online, or if you are already in a physics class, you can add our material to what you are learning in your class to really improve your understanding.

When you graduate from school and enter the workforce, you will work very differently from the way you are used to working in school. For example, you will be expected to work on complex projects, to locate information by yourself, to cooperate with other people in teams, to make plans, reach conclusions and write reports.

In other words, your future managers will expect you to take the lead in solving problems, and also be good at working with other people. In this course, you will get the kind of experience both in learning and in communicating that should make you more successful (and better paid!), when you are in that future job.

Each chapter in the course is introduced through a question and answer conversation between an instructor and several curious students. After this introduction, we will ask you to study the subject further on several public web sites.

Thus you will learn, not by reading a single textbook from beginning to end, but by researching a number of web sites and selecting the ones which best fit your learning needs.

In this process, you will learn to be critical in evaluating information from your classmates and from your web site resources. Not every comment from a classmate will be true or helpful, and not every web site will be the right resource for you. So, this is a more complex way of learning, but it will help you build maturity and critical judgement which will be a great help to you in your other courses and in your career.

Published Texts

1. "Conceptual Physics, Third Edition"; Paul Hewitt; Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley. This book gives a very good conceptual treatment of physics on the high school level.

2. "Physics, Principles with Applications, Fifth Edition"; Douglas C. Giancoli; Prentice Hall. This is a good algebra based text supporting a one year college level course.

3. "Physics, Fourth Edition"; John D. Cutnell and Kenneth W. Johnson; John Wiley & Sons. This is also a good algebra based text for a one year college level course. It is comparable to Giancoli's text referenced above.

4. "Fundamentals of Physics, Fifth Edition"; David Halliday, Robert Resnick and Jearl Walker; John & Sons. This is a good calculus based text normally covered in three college semesters.

Internet Resources: Public Physics Web Sites.

We have located ten public websites which you can use at this time to help you learn the material in this course. While you are taking the course, more sites will probably become available to you as we learn about them.

These sites have been created by a number of physics teachers for their own students, and they have offered the material to anyone who is on the Internet to use.

We suggest that you study at least two of these sites for each chapter. If you select a site that is either too simple or too hard for you, try another one. When you post your report on the Discussion Group for each chapter, tell your classmates what you thought of the web sites you selected and how helpful they were in helping you learn the material.

Web Site List.

We list these sites below with their links and a short description. Following the list is a table which shows which sites cover the material in each of our chapters. You will note that a particular chapter will not be covered by all of these sites, but you will find some sites for each of the chapters. CAUTION: Some of these sites may go down from time to time. If you find that a particular link does not work, select another site, and come back to your first site at a later time.

1. The Physics Classroom The Physics Classroom is an online physics tutorial written for high school physics students to support the Physics 163 class at Glenbrook South High School in Illinois. This site is very clear and easy to follow with animations and diagrams. The chapters are not numbered, but you can locate the material which is comparable to our chapters by comparing the chapter titles. We have indicated which of our chapters are covered on this site by an "X" in the table below.

2. Lecture Online, Michigan State University This site provides very good coverage for an algebra based college course. When you get to the homepage, you will need to enter the following to access the site:

username: demo
password: demo
class: app
Then click on "Login". Click on the down arrow in the top center of the screen to select the chapter.

This is a very good site, but it may be not be available in the future. If you find this link or password do not work, please let us know.

3. Learn Physics Today This is a good high school level site covering the early chapters in mechanics. However, it does not cover the later chapters of the first semester or the second semester of the course. This site is an online physics tutorial developed by Keiji Oenoki, Kazushi Oenoki, Hector Judez, Hyun Ku Cho, and John Lakatos at Colegio Franklin D. Roosevelt in Lima, Peru.

4A. University of Texas, First Semester This site gives the lecture notes of Richard Fitzpatrick, University of Texas at Austin. This is the first semester of a calculus based course covering mechanics. It does not cover waves or thermal physics. There is a lot of material on this site. It is hard to read on the screen, but if you have Adobe Acrobat, you can print it for much easier readability. There are a few errors in some of the drawings and a couple pages that won't print, so you may need to print some of the files in sections. Click on the chapter title under Course Notes to get the notes for each chapter. You can get the notes in either HTML or Adobe Acrobat. Overall this is very good site with clear explanations and lots of information.

4B. University of Texas, Second Semester This is the second semester of the course referenced above. The same comments apply to this site.

5A. Boston University First Semester This is an algebra based course which covers mechanics, fluids, waves, thermal physics. When you get to the site, click on Course Schedule, and then links to all the lectures come up. The lectures do not have chapter numbers, so we show the left column lecture dates in the table below. The lectures have good conversational explanations with diagrams and simulations. The course is based on Giancoli's textbook referenced at the top of this page. It appears that some things like the derivations of equations of motion are left out, so another site should be used to supplement this one.

5B. Boston University Second Semester.  This is the second semester of the course referenced above. Click on Course Schedule and Class Notes to get links to all the lectures. Again we show the lecture dates in the table below. The course includes E&M, optics, geometric and physical, Quantum mech, Bohr model,Radioactivity. Same kind of treatment as first semester. Follows Giancoli, covers every chapter except special relativity. Has sample exams with solutions.

6. Cuyahoga Community College, Ohio.  Lecture notes by Fred Gram. This is an interesting site with a sense of humor. The organizaion is somewhat unusual, but it has an interesting treatment of the material. There are no chapter numbers, but you can find the material which corresponds to our chapters by comparing our chapter titles to the titles of the links in this site. We mark an "X" in the table below for our chapters which are covered on this site.

7. University of Illinois  Lecture notes by Prof. Ian Robinson. There are 27 chapters, and the chapter number appears just before the chapter outline. It takes a little long for these pages to load, but the site covers all of our chapters in the first semester. If you encounter a password box, enter "guest" (without the quotes) for the username and also "guest" for the password

8. University of Winnipeg  Lecture notes from a very good non-calculus introductory physics course, Physics 1301, given through the IUN/FYDE distance education program of the University of Winnipeg. This site covers Mechanics, Waves, Electricity and Magnetism, Wave properties of light--Optics, Quantum, Atomic and Nuclear Physics. There are no chapter numbers, but you can locate the material which corresponds to our chapters by comparing the chapter titles. Our chapters which are covered on this site are indicated by an "X" in the table below.

9. University of the West Indies  This site is a calculus based course covering Electricity and Magnetism. Lecture notes, assignments, exams, animations by Janak Sodha, University of the West Indies. Math appendix on trig, exponents, logs, calculus, vector relations, quadradic equations, geometry formulae. Lecture on integration. The chapters are short, but well explained. Uses calculus. Some Java applets don't come up but the ones that do are good. Prescribed textbook is "Fundamentals of Physics" by Halliday, Resnick and Walker, referenced above.

10. City University of Hong Kong  Lecture notes, assignments by H. F. Cheung and Peter Yu. This site seems a little difficult to follow, but it can suplement other sites. There is a lot of material and some animations. There may be problems with some of the animations. Click on "Studio Script" in the left column of the home page to get the list of chapters.

Web Site Table.

In the table below, you will find our chapter number and title in the two left hand columns. In the other columns you can see which web sites cover the material in our chapters. If that chapter material is covered by a particular web site, the chapter number for that site will appear in the table.

If you would like to go immediately to any of these sites, you can click on the link for the site at the top of the column.

In some cases, material in one of our chapters will be covered by several chapters on the other web site, and several chapter numbers will appear in the table. In some of the web sites, the chapters are not numbered. In these cases, you will find an X in the table in the cell for our chapter and that web site.

If the web site does not cover the material in one of our chapters, that cell in the table will be blank.

For example, for our Chapter 15, The Laws of Thermodynamics, you will see that this material is covered by Michigan State University in their chapter 12, by Boston University in their lectures 12-6 to 12-10, by The University of Illinois in their chapter 22, and by the City University of Hong Kong in their chapters 19 and 21. The other sites do not cover thermodynamics. So here is your table. Enjoy!

Supporting Web Sites for Physics I & II

Ch         Title                                                    Chapters Covered