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===== Comments by Mary Bridget Kustusch (post-doc, co-teaching "Static Vector Fields" in Fall 2011): =====


According to Ed Price, when his students were given a non-conservative field first, they assumed they had done the differentiation incorrectly instead of concluding that the field is non-conservative.

To address this issue, we reversed the order of the first two problems to provide the conservative example first. Unfortunately, the conservative example is in cylindrical coordinates and there is only one term in the potential. It went ok in class, but based on some of the questions we were getting both during and after the activity, we have revised the activity even further. 

Now, the first example is a conservative field in rectangular coordinates that has a potential with multiple terms. The hope is that this will better facilitate discussion of about the necessity of corroborating witness accounts with each other since each was looking in a different direction. The second example is a non-conservative field in rectangular coordinates. The third is the field of a point charge in cylindrical coordinates (no $\phi$ component). The last example is the same field from the second example in cylindrical coordinates, which requires them to deal with the $\phi$ coordinate and allows for a comparison between the second and fourth problems.

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