Month: August 2013

Today after school was the first meeting of the year for Physics Club! This year our students will be mentoring around forty middle school students in the construction of underwater remotely-operated vehicles. Twenty five students showed up before the long weekend to learn our plans.

 

 

Today students tested their model against the Pendulum of Death (a quiet death, death, death echoes…)! Some groups couldn’t definitive choose a relationship and prepared two predictions. After calculating the percent difference (1% for one model and > 20% for the other, their choice was clear!

 

##expdesign ##paradigmlab

 

After whiteboarding the pendulum lab, inconclusive results, discussing best practices for gathering data, students wanted to gather new data for the pendulum lab. Their goal is to generalize their model and apply it to the bowling ball pendulum in the room. There wasn’t consensus on how to measure its length; so, they measured it several ways!

##expdesign ##paradigmlab

 

Great initial meeting of the leads of the new Technology Integration Team. I shared the highlights of my recent rant about EdTech which was warmly received. We will be reading Creating Innovators, which looks good. I was having so much fun, I almost forgot to go to class and was a few minutes late!

Found on clearance at OfficeMax this weekend (the covers not the textbooks). Now each group has a covered text or use in the classroom.

 

##equipment

 

Whiteboarding special relativity problems. Resulted in the realization of velocity invariance.

##whiteboarding

 

 

Turtle graphics is a great way to show students that they can experiment, explore, and make something cool without understanding all of the details up front. I love the tone it set for AP Computer Science this year!

 

I love starting the year with the Marshmallow Challenge! This group had the tallest structure. Surprisingly, all groups elevated their marshmallow off the table at least some.