Initial Curriculum Task

As a physics curriculum developer at Art of Problem Solving, you'll write almost every day. We're including this writing task in our application so you a chance to showcase the way you challenge and motivate students with physics problems. We're looking for problems that give students a chance to think deeply and build new ideas. Often, problems help students appreciate natural phenomena or devise solutions to challenges in other sciences or in everyday life.

Imagine that you are working on a course on electromagnetism for curious, motivated high school students with strong math skills. Below is a physics problem you read in a book. You would like to use the core idea of the problem in the course you're writing, but you need to make sure it serves your course goals. Adapt the problem however you like, solve your adapted problem, and explain your choices. Please return:

Your new problem
A complete solution to the new problem
Your annotations, explaining anything you would like us to know about your submission. E.g. your goals for the problem, why you made the changes you did, assumptions you're making about the students' backgrounds, etc.

Feel free to use any format that you work well in to create your new problem. We will be looking for the broad pedagogical approach and general writing quality. If your rewrite needs images, for example, feel free to hand-draw simple versions, include them from other sources with attribution, or to describe in words what the images would show if you were to make them.

Problem: Suppose you connect a thin wire and a thick wire to a battery in series. Which wire gets hotter? What if you connect the wires in parallel?

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