Using Education Research to Develop Waves Courseware

The topic of waves forms the foundation of many branches of physics, such as acoustics, opties, and quantum mechanics.Thus it is essential that students of physics acquire a good understanding of waves if they wish to understand many other aspects of physics.Unfortunately, this topic presents a serious obstacle to many students, who often find it abstract and too mathematical.In order to help make the topic more accessible to students, Aronsl recommends that waves be introduced from a kinematical perspective by first considering graphical representations of single, transverse pulses.In this way, students are provided with a bridge from a more familiar and more concrete domain, kinematics, to a less familiar and more abstract domain, waves.Moreover, this approach to waves provides a context in which students can apply, reinforce, and extend graphing skills initially learned in kinematics.From a kinematical perspective, transverse displacement (y) of a point on a string is analogous to displacement in one dimension, and the (transverse) velocity of that point can be found by taking the slope of a graph of (transverse) displacement versus time.However, the string is not a single particle, nor is it a rigid body that moves as a whole.Rather, it consists of many pieces that do not move together.Thus, transverse displacement depends not only on the time of observation but also on which piece of the string is observed.Consequently, a new variable, position along the string (x), is needed.The motion of a pulse on a string thus provides a context in which to introduce the notion of a function of two independent variables.Another important aspect of waves is the need to distinguish between the motion of the pulse and the motion of particles of the medium as the pulse passes through them.This distinction can be highlighted by plotting an x versus t