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Comments by Mary Bridget Kustusch (post-doc, co-teaching "Spins" in Winter 2012):

This year, we had assigned the Spins 1/2 Unknowns as a homework assignment and did the Spins 1 in class. We had them do this activity and the Finding the Unknown States Leaving the Oven in a Spin-1 System activity immediately afterward.

We asked student to self-select based on whether they felt comfortable with the material (high, medium, and low) and then created groups within each category in order to provide more directed help with the groups that only had low or medium confidence. This worked particularly well with this activity.

After they had figured out the probabilities, we had everyone do the first unknown state and discussed how to verify with $\hat{n}\cdot \vec{S}$. Then, we assigned a different unknown to each group ($\ket{\psi_3}$ to the least confident, $\ket{\psi_2}$ to the medium confident, and $\ket{\psi_4}$ to the most confident).

This setup seemed to work really well and was an excellent setup for them to then go and do the simpler Spin-1/2 unknowns for homework.


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