Physics 105 Gets Stuck in the Mud

Kim Johnson – Isn’t it every boy’s dream to spend a sunny morning outside playing in the mud? Add on top of that, getting college credit for it, and it becomes Wabash Physics 105.

 

It’s not quite that simplistic, and honestly, I am glad I do not have to do the lab report that goes along with this day in the mud. But for the Physics 105 class, known on campus as “Mythbusters,” it’s really just another day in the lab. See photos here.

 

When Professor of Physics Martin Madsen literally got stuck in the mud a year ago, a lesson plan was born. “For two hours I tried everything I had heard of to get my truck unstuck – put weight in the back of the truck, put stuff under the wheels, put boards under the wheels,” Madsen said. “Nothing worked.

 

“I thought since we’re dealing with friction this semester, we’ll make this one of our myths.”

 

  

The class began with remote control cars and then wanted to move on to actual trucks for testing. Madsen, who coincidentally is a member of the campus safety committee, had to deny that request, but when he saw a member of campus services drive by one day in a golf cart, he thought that might be a plausible option.

 

Thanks to Mother Nature’s soaking earlier in the week, the guys didn’t have to tote too many buckets of water to a low-lying area of Mud Hollow. With shovels, sticks, saw dust, gravel, and mulch in hand, the real trick for the student teams seemed to be getting stuck rather than getting unstuck.

 

After a couple hours of testing a variety of methods to get out of the mud, the teams began the real work of this class – the reporting.

 

What’s cool about the class is it doesn’t have a textbook. And rather than memorize formulas, compute numbers, and recite facts, every member of the class carries a video camera as his lab “notebook.”

 

In some ways, that’s also what makes the class more difficult than one with a textbook full of formulas and numbers. Students research the myth, figure out which formulas and calculations they need to make an educated guess at a solution, record all the raw data, and then turn the hours of video into a 10-minute presentation proving (or disproving, as the case may be) the given myth.