Lesson Plan: Uniform Electric Fields
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to determine the change in potential energy of charged objects that move parallel to uniform electric fields.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- recognize that parallel lines of uniformly distributed electric charges, where charges on one line are the opposite sign of the charges on the other line, result in an approximately uniform electric field between the lines,
- recognize that the electric field magnitude of a uniform electric field is constant throughout the field,
- relate the magnitude of a uniform electric field, , to the absolute electric potential at a point in the field at a distance d from the positively charged region from which the field lines originate, using the equation ,
- recognize that the potential difference across the ends of a uniform electric field is the difference between the absolute electric potential at the end of the field at which the field lines originate and the end at which they terminate,
- quantitatively model the motion of charged particles within uniform electric fields.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- Coulomb’s law,
- the electric field of a point charge,
- the absolute electric potential difference,
- two-dimensional kinematics.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- descriptions of the resultant electric fields due to symmetrical distributions of electric charge other than parallel straight lines of uniform charge density,
- any effect on a uniform electric field of the electric fields of charged particles within the field.
