Homework Central is a web site designed to help introductory physics students like you to find efficient and effective ways to analyze, understand, and answer homework questions. The goal is not only to help you complete your homework quickly, but also to help you use the homework as a way to extract useful knowledge, practice basic skills, and develop the logical thinking skills needed to succeed in physics.

Suggestions

For each homework question, we start by providing some suggestions for basic activities that we hope will bridge the gap between what you know already and what you are expected to do. (Click here, and a sample page will appear in a new window.)

Hints

At the end of many suggested activities, you will find a link that will take you to the beginning of a sequence of hints we hope will help you execute the activity or understand more completely how to approach the situation. After many of the hints, there will be a link to another hint.

Finding particular hints and suggestions

The available web pages are organized according to the source of the associated question or problem. If you click on the folder labeled "Suggestions" in the navigation bar, you will see an indented list of subfolders (click here to open the main suggestions page in a new window). The names of these folders correspond to different sources. For instance, "HRW" refers to a physics textbook written by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker. When you click on one of these subfolders, you will see a list of "units" (01, 02, 03...). When you click on one of these units, you will see a list of the questions and problems for which there are suggestions. (Note that the "(Other)" folder is structured a little differently, but you'll get the idea.)

This site is under construction, so you should not expect to find suggestions for every problem in every textbook. For now, only assignments in Physics 151, Section 1 are complete, though many of the same questions have been assigned in other courses and sections.

How to use this site

If you are having difficulty with a particular question, go to the suggestions page corresponding to that question and read the first recommended activity. If it sounds useful but you cannot accomplish the activity, use the hints, but don't spend a lot of time unless the activity makes sense to you. If the first recommended activity is not working out for you, try the next activity. There are typically three or four recommended activities for each homework question, each with hints to help you execute them.

Comments and questions about this site

We hope that you find this web site useful. If you have any comments or questions about Homework Central, please contact Bill Leonard at wjleonard@physics.umass.edu.