I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car, etc, but I wouldn't assess based on them. If students are going to be engineers or heavily use physics, they can go to AP physics and college physics classes and draw complicated free body diagrams and set up big equations.
10 * 10 = ?
Which of those two is a proper test question?
Is that really a "trick" question? The balloon drifts to the underside of the roof on the inside of the turn.
> I wouldn't assess based on them
I would. I expect physics students to get past their knee-jerk intuitions and think about the principles they've been taught. Otherwise what's the point of learning physics?
Back in those days there was an annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students, and that homework set happened to come out right before that. The Disneyland trips always had a large number of first year students, and Ph 1 is a required course for all first year students, so something like 80% of the people in my bus on that trip had opinions on that problem. Several bought balloons when it was time to return to the buses.
It must have been a strange sight to the bus driver to see the entire busload of students get on the bus and then just sit in silence staring at balloons while waiting for the bus to start moving.
Sure-- per a sibling comment of mine, it tricks half of freshmen at Caltech. Throwing it at a random 8th or 9th grader can be expected to be even worse.
> I would. I expect physics students to get past their knee-jerk intuitions and think about the principles they've been taught. Otherwise what's the point of learning physics?
In 8th grade?
A) To learn a little bit about the world works
B) to get a whole lot of practical experience with dimensional analysis, applying formulae, and drawing diagrams of simple systems
C) to begin to decide if deep study on this track might be for you, hopefully building a little bit of wonder that might inspire you to study it more deeply and pay attention to physics in the world around you.
To be more general: if you're giving an 8th-9th grade kinematics test, there's two or three families of easy inclined plane problems, and hopefully your students have seen a few of all types. They shouldn't know the answer is "3.5 m/s", but they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it.
Huh, I was in Page House in 1977, and never heard of that. I do recall the whole House trooping off to see the premier of Star Wars :-)
Let's clear that up, make it: 1289 * 689
> they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it.
And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select".
They are freshman, i.e. untrained minds. Me, I probably would have failed that question at the time, too. Such a question wouldn't have been on a test, however, as test questions always involved a lot of math.
I remember one inglorious physics midterm exam that over half of the students flunked. The prof had some angry words for the class.
> In 8th grade?
Sure, if you'd laid the groundwork in class.
Now that I think about it I'm not sure if the ASCIT Disneyland trips were actually annually. I know that ASCIT did one in my frosh year, which was 1977-78, and I'm sure they did one in my junior year because I took advantage of a lot of people being away on that trip to try magic mushrooms. I didn't want to have to deal with a lot of people while tripping.
That didn't quite go as expected. As I wandered around campus enjoying the hallucinogenic effects of the psilocybin, I kept running into Chinese people I did not recognize, many of whom were speaking Chinese.
Walter of course knows this, but for the rest of you Caltech is small enough (under 1000 undergrads) that one should be able to recognize most of the other students on sight. Also, the percentage of Asian students at Caltech was a lot lower back then, so I could tell most of these people weren't Caltech students just by the shear number of them.
I was starting to freak out a little bit because I'd read up on the effects of psilocybin before trying it and highly realistic full sensory interactive hallucinations of Chinese people was way outside the bounds of anything I expected, so I thought something might be going really wrong like the 'shrooms I bought were laced with something else.
It turned out that I was in fact seeing real Chinese undergraduates--but not from Caltech. I was not the only one who decided to take advantage of the campus being a little less crowded that night. The Chinese Students Association had decided to throw a party and invite all the Chinese students from all the other schools in the Los Angeles area including UCLA and USC.
They (ASCIT, not CSA!) were still at least occasionally doing this at least up to the mid '80s. There's an article in an '84 issue of the Tech [1] that mentioned Disneyland trips as one of the things that wouldn't be happening if not for ASCIT.
[1] https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_...
And if my goal is to figure out if a student has mastery of standard multiplication algorithms, I can take that 1289 * 689 question and flip the digits around have have an equivalent question -- 1688 * 986 will serve just fine. The algorithms aren't secret, and multiplication being on the test shouldn't be a secret.
> And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select".
If you teach 8th grade physics, you pretty quickly build a library of all the standard inclined plane problems. If you need to give someone a make-up or repeat test, you grab some from tests that you've given in past years that have not been problematic, and switch a number or two.
I was also off-campus for the 78-79 year, which in retrospect was a mistake, as that caused me to miss a lot of went on.
I'm wondering if the Disneyland trips started in 78-79?
Anyhow, fun story about the Chinese students!
We also had Page House excursions to the premier of Alien, which was pretty exciting for me, whereas today doesn't even elicit a flicker of interest :-/
The best was a House excursion to see Animal House. The one-liners from that movie became memes from the next year. One dude was taking an extra year to get his degree, and all year people would pass him in the hall with <cough>5 years of college down the drain!</cough>.
It's nice to see a fellow techer here on HN, especially a vintage 1970s one!