I have taught this course a few times over my career. In Winter 2025 I am trying two new things. First off, some course structure is in order. We meet twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday) for about 2 hours per meeting. The space is smaller than a typical classroom, which puts all 11 students fairly close to one another. Our text is Classical Mechanics by John Taylor.

The first thing I'm doing that I've never really pushed on before is 10 minutes of presentation nearly every meeting. Each Tuesday students are given 4 new "homework" problems to complete by the following Tuesday. At the start of Thursday's class I ask for a volunteer to present some work on 1 of the 4 problems for the week. If no one volunteers, I'll draw a name from a bag. The presentation is board writing and explanation of some of the work done so far. I don't expect full solutions, nor do I expect fully correct work. The goal is to give students the opportunity to talk about some physics in front of others, and to see work done by classmates if they are not presenting. Questions are encouraged. Notes and outlines from the work shown are also encouraged.

Then, on the following Tuesday another person has a turn presenting on a different problem from the set. Once a student has gone, they are "out of the rotation" until everyone present in class that day has had their turn. Work on these 4 problems is to be submitted that evening. I post an outline of the solutions, and next week's work is made available. 4 problems per week isn't a huge amount of work, if students spread things over the 7 days in a reasonable manner. It's also relatively straightforward to get things done if they work together in some way.

The other thing I'm trying are experimental exercises. I've come up with 3 experiments for this first attempt. We'll take 1 hour or so on each experiment day to collect data. Then, we'll talk about the theory that models the data and try to compare our measurements with the prediction. The first experiment is quadratic drag. Students will drop 3d printed balls through a column of water. The balls have BBs in them to slightly overcome buoyancy. Our second experiment will be with coupled torsional oscillators. Two 3d printed bars will be mounted on a vertical copper wire. The low end of the wire will be attached to a 1 kg mass. The wire will extend up over a pulley and a 0.2 kg mass will hang from the other end. Between the 1 kg mass and the pulley, the two bars will be mounted. This is a spring-mass-spring-mass-spring system. If we lock one of the bars in place, we can measure the oscillation frequency of the other. Swap roles. Then try to examine the coupling. The final experiment will be the double Atwood's Machine. This is one of the canonical Lagrangian systems studied in this course, but I have seen very little in terms of data collected. The behavior of the system can be very counterintuitive, but the physics is the physics.

We'll see how these pan out. I'm excited about them. We've had 3 students present already, and I'm pleased with what they are doing. On Tuesday 28 Jan we'll do the quadratic drag experiment. The worst it can be is awful. If that's the case, we'll learn and move on.