Today, AP Physics 2 students completed the lenses lab. I was at a 6-12 science curriculum meeting; so, I left them with the same equipment as they had for the mirror lab but substituted lenses for mirrors. I’ll find out on Monday if they found the similarities of the properties of the images formed by lenses and by mirrors.
My colleague and I spent a portion of the day sharing bits and pieces of Modeling Instruction with 6th and 8th grade teachers. We did an activity with the constant-velocity buggies and Video Physics on iPads to create graphs of position vs. time and velocity vs. time. We then connected the video annotated with the position of the buggy to that of a motion map. We also shared interaction diagrams, force diagrams, and LOL diagrams. Everything was really well received and there is interest in a longer workshop in the future. It would be fantastic if students were exposed to these representations in 6th, 8th, 9th, and 11th grades!
##optics ##representations ##workshop