(Liz Spring 2016)

I chose to have all the groups do the pole and the barn paradox, rather than have different groups alternate between that and the space wars paradox. We did this paradox without the benefit of spacetime diagrams. It went reasonably well. Some students struggled with having to do a Lorentz transformation rather than length contraction and time dilation separately. Other students (understandably) struggled to choose an event as the simultaneous origin of coordinate for the two reference frames. Thinking of the events as vectors in spacetime was a struggle for most students.

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