Belated goodness of the calculus variety

I've been out of the habit of blogging for some time now, mostly because I'm teaching new courses this year. One is AP Calculus, and while it's way more fun than I imagined it would be, the workload is onerous.

I've been trying to integrate as many real-world experiences as possible into class. Curiously, some students really resent this: they believe that math courses are for doing dry problem sets, not analyzing phenomena from the wild. It's an interesting mindset, and breaking the I-we-you routine (see third paragraph) that they expect has proven difficult. We've found a compromise that seems to be working reasonably well, and we've been doing some neat things.

Yesterday we found a way to do the classic sliding ladder problem experimentally. It took a while to get the setup right, but in the end it worked like a charm.

The camera was a little bit too high to see the constant velocity buggy, but I was able to track its motion using the top of the bulls-eye I drew on a piece of paper and attached. The vertical bulls-eye worked like a charm- Tracker's autotracker function is sweet.

Using the x, y, and dx/dt values at t=1.4s predicted a dy/dy of -0.255 m/s Experimentally we got -0.2146 m/s. Not bad for the first go-around.

Stuff I've found useful lately:
Keeping me full of good ideas: Think Thank Thunk
Notes and Organization: OneNote
Graphing: FluidMath (still working on using this more- wish it worked inside OneNote or that OneNote had better math recognition)
Good read: Dan Kennedy
I'll do my best to post more regularly. Hope all is well!