Reinvigorating Keele's Physics contribution

[duffee]

Hello, all!

Picking up where I left off 3 years ago and bringing more problems for consideration. I'd like to do what is needed to get them accepted into the OPL.

I have left Keele for industry, but I still author problems with Zak Zarychta in my spare time, so I've changed my contact email in the README to my gmail. Please verify with Zak who is still at the university. I've included both our github usernames and you can see that the original PR for the Keele directory is from my account (duffee). The README is the last of the 391 files in this PR. (sorry)

Zak's course is using the OpenStax textbook, College Physics for AP Courses by Wolfe, et al, 2015 which thankfully shares the same Problems & Exercises as College Physics by Urone, 2017. These problems were originally submitted to the OPL by BrockPhysics in College_Physics_Urone, but they haven't made it to the OpenProblemLibrary yet.

Changes made:

• converted to use MathObjects and NumberWithUnits for better student feedback and problem display
• cleaned up the programming style to make it easier to debug/modify the problems
• corrected any errors found, ~2% of problems
• solutions have been added for students and to make it easier for non-programmers to find calculation errors
• KEYWORDS and DB subject/chapter/section metadata the same, but changed the AuthorText1 to the Wolfe edition to avoid any namespace conflicts that may arise
• added RESOURCE metadata for problems with images
• modified some images to make problems more dynamic (measurements -> variables)
• moved images into problem directories to make them self-contained
• removed external and unused macros
• tolerances set to 0.005 where only 3 sig figs are used

There are 5 chapters in this PR with 4 more in the pipeline. I thought adding complete chapters might be friendlier. I'd heard of the effort to create a taxonomy for physics last summer, but I haven't found the outcomes. Let me know what I need to do to bring them up to standard.

After moaning for so many years about the paucity of physics problems in the OPL, it's about time I stepped up. After all, if you're not a part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

[drdrew42]

Thanks for these updated versions -- it is the case that they've maintained the filenames of the BrockPhysics problems from which they were adapted? It seems that way -- am I wrong in presuming that these should be considered as 'upgrades' to the originals?

Furthermore, for textbook alignment, multiple textbooks can be declared in the tags. For the second textbook declared, use TitleText2, AuthorText2, Section2, etc. Further incrementation allows for more textbooks to be included. It seems like you may have swapped out one aligned text for another -- I just want to make sure you're aware of how multiple texts can be used.

[youngutpb]

Thanks for this. I look forward to looking over your problems to use in my classes. Douglas Young

[duffee]

Hi Andrew,
Sorry for the delay getting back to you. I got distracted by a guiding a PR through acceptance and two bouts of Covid (which was only detrimental to my side projects).

is it the case that they've maintained the filenames of the BrockPhysics problems from which they were adapted? Am I wrong in presuming that these should be considered as 'upgrades' to the originals?

Yes, they've maintained the same filenames. The naming scheme for the subdirectories have been made consistent with the style in Chapter 12.
E.g.
Keele/College_Physics_Wolfe/11.Fluid_Statics/11-02.Density/NU_U17-11-02-002.pg maps to
BrockPhysics/College_Physics_Urone/11.Fluid_Statics/NU_U17-11-02-002.pg

IMHO, they are upgrades, but the original authors may consider them a fork due to my design decisions.

Furthermore, for textbook alignment, multiple textbooks can be declared in the tags. For the second textbook declared, use TitleText2, AuthorText2, Section2, etc. Further incrementation allows for more textbooks to be included. It seems like you may have swapped out one aligned text for another

I chose to swap the AuthorText1 and EditionText1 in case there was a namespace clash, although I haven't seen a difference in the problems between the two texts yet. Would you recommend reverting to the original BrockPhysics edition tags (Urone 2017) and adding AuthorText2(Wolfe) and EditionText(2015) to the updated versions or to do the reverse, marking these problems out as new but related problems with Wolfe 2015 as Text1 and Urone 2017 as Text2?

[duffee]

Hi @youngutpb

If you're getting impatient with my output rate and you're willing to consider problems not yet in the OPL, my working repo (in Gitlab) has additional problems on Oscillations and Waves, Resistivity and Radioactive half-life. I'll get back to my TODO list as soon as I've rebuilt my Webwork server. Are there any areas in particular that you're interested in?