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This activity requires leading the students rather more than one would like, but it does help them tackle a problem essential to understanding their experiment. It also represents a level of sophistication beyond introductory physics that sets the tone for the rest of the year. The mathematics is not “difficult” in any intrinsic sense - it is all algebra once the basic idea of series expansion is known. However, it requires accuracy, persistence, some experience, and an ability to self-diagnose errors. All these skills are novice-level in our beginning students.

It is also a very long exercise (if all the series expansion part is included); the students get tired. It is perhaps better conducted over two days, with sections relegated to homework.

This year, I will teach this course before the students take “Symmetries”, so they won't have learned series expansions yet. I don't intend to take them through the series expansion part of the worksheet under these circumstances, but rather concentrate on using a computer to calculate the period integral.

JT 8/2010

5/2012: Not doing the entire series expansion exercise eased the time pressure significantly and I didn't do the exercise in 2011, either, but I think the students' skills with series expansion suffered.