Day 67: Capacitors in Series and Parallel in RC Circuits

Today I was off-campus for professional development related to our district’s Digital Learning Initiative. Given that we ran short on time yesterday, I gave them a more detailed than normal purpose for today’s lab: “Determine the effect on the circuit of adding a second capacitor in series or in parallel (half the groups add in series; half in parallel) to an RC circuit. Specifically, graphically and mathematically model the relationship between voltage across the capacitor(s) and time as the capacitor(s) discharge. Extract the time constant from this mathematical model and determine how the equivalent capacitance changes with the addition of the second capacitor.” I left them a demo circuit as well.

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No frantic emails or messages were sent to me during class, which is a good sign. They left whiteboards summarizing their conclusions in the classroom; I’ll take a look tomorrow during our institute day and see how it went!

  ##circuits ##paradigmlab  

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