The impulse curve may be used to examine the time dependence of the engine force and to analyze features of rocket flight. Most of the students who take the course have essentially no background in science and particularly physics. Although the course is required and terminal, it is not intended to prepare science teachers. One goal of the course is to set the stage for acquiring skills needed for continued learning long after the course is over. One of the ways I have tried to motivate student interest in science and particularly in physics is to require them to design and perform simple demonstrations in front of their peers.
Evaluation is based on performance and explanation of the demonstration.
I will discuss a few of the demonstrations the students have done in the past and my own assessment of the practice as a skill development tool. Air will be the gas used for the compression since it is a very close approximation to a diatomic gas. A large class can use the one piece of apparatus and acquire data in a very short time. This talk will describe how Mossbauer spectra are taken, discuss some of the problems encountered in developing our sample probe, and discuss how they were solved. As part of a project funded by NSF, a large number of physics problems have been solved in both Maple and Mathematica.