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Wednesday 21 March 2018

Thought I'd get my students to write about their EEs. Here is the first:

Writing and Extended Essay in Physics is not one of the easiest things I have done as a student; however, I must admit is one of the most interesting and fulfilling ones. I never had the opportunity to do a proper investigation in Physics before (more than the IA) so I had so many ideas related to what I wanted to investigate; this made me change my topic three times. Finally, after months of changing topics, I found what I would call my perfect topic: 'Deflection in non-uniform fields'; finding this topic was like love at first sight; every time I read more about it just made me be more interested in it. My interest in this topic started because the books I have read present a clear model of the motion of a charged particle in a uniform fields; however, they barely explain the motion in a non-uniform field; therefore, I thought it will be a good idea to try to create a model by dividing the non-uniform field in extremely small uniform fields and then combine them. The model resulted to be accurate enough to predict the motion of an electron in a non-uniform field; however, I was aware that this model also made many assumptions which is something it can be improved with further development. Finally, writing an Extended Essay on physics made me deal on a minor scale with problems and the environment that real physicists deal in their everyday life by forcing me to create my own method and experiment, think about a model and all the mathematics behind it, and experienced technical problems such as a burned power supply. 


Tags: EE, reflections

Shah
22 Mar 2018