Tonight, Huskie Robotics held our end-of-season celebration at Navistar. Navistar CEO, Troy Clarke, shared an inspiring message. We thanked our sponsors, mentors, teachers, and parents. We recognized our graduating seniors, all of whom are pursuing STEM-related majors. We also premiered our 2014 Season Highlights Video embedded here.
Huskie Robotics, Team 3061, 2014 Season from Naperville North High School on Vimeo.
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Art students had an assignment to incorporate materials from another class into an art piece. One of my AP Physics B students incorporated a geometric optics free response question into his piece. He gave me the artwork to display in the classroom. Awesome!
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Instructure, creators of the Canvas LMS, visited our district and my classroom recently; it was great to host them. They sent a thank you package to us. We have a couple neat shirts to wear and great notebooks for each student. Very cool!
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Today, we continued developing the electric pressure model. I introduced the CASTLE representation for electric pressure where the relative pressure is denoted by different colored wires in the circuit diagram. The contrast of colors reinforces that there must be an electric pressure difference in order for current to flow and bulbs to glow. In addition, if the current is constant, elements with greater resistance require a greater difference in electric pressure than elements with less resistance. This year, my colleague carefully chose the diagrams such that five colors of electric pressure (highest, high, normal, low, lowest) would suffice, which avoids having to color wires orangish-red. This diagrammatic technique is a powerful way for students to visualize voltage. For homework tonight, they will revisit the pizza problem and solve it using our new electric pressure model.
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In Honors Physics, we have finished elaborating the current model, identified its limitation with the pizza problem, and have started exploring the voltage model. We are now using the CASTLE materials including the modifications for Modeling Instruction. Presenting voltage as the difference in electric pressure resonates well with students. The concept is reinforced by drawing an analogy to air pressure. I introduce this analogy with the air capacitor:
The air capacitor is constructed from two peanut butter jars with rubber stoppers and fired glass tubes in each end. A balloon is stretched around one of the jars and then the jars are joined with packing tape such that the balloon acts as a membrane between the two halves of the air capacitor. The balloon serves as a visual indication of the pressure difference between the two halves of the apparatus. This apparatus reinforces a couple key aspects of the analogy:
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Every spring, the teams and clubs gather in the field house to welcome the incoming freshmen, show them the variety of activities available, and sign up potentially interested students. Huskie Robotics, FIRST Team 3061, and Physics Club were there in force. This year’s robot, Annie, drew a crowd and the students, as always, did a fantastic job sharing their passion for FIRST and the team. Sixty five incoming freshman expressed interested and signed up. This year we gathered their personal email addresses so we can invite them to summer events.
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I’ve used a few assessment tools over the years. I still have nightmares about some. Due to these emotional scars, I’ve been putting off trying our district’s latest tool, Master Manager. Both my AP Computer Science and AP Physics classes are in the midst of their final exams (which double as practice for their AP exams); so, I decided to see if Mastery Manager could help in the administration and analysis. I’ve been really impressed so far. Every time I went looking for a feature, I found it. I can score an assessment based on multiple sections, print forms based on a different set of sections, capture both multiple choice and free response scores, generate efficient student reports, and see all the item analysis statistics.
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A few students from Huskie Robotics and a couple from last year’s national qualifying Underwater ROV team are working on preparing the robot for this year’s competition. They compete this Saturday and have been building for less than two weeks. It’s pretty impressive how far they’ve come.
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Today while students took the PSAE (Prairie State Achievement Exam), those of us on the Science Curriculum Team continued to analyze the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Performance Expectations, organize them into cohesive groupings, and sequence them into courses for 6th through 11th grade. By lunch, we had an example from each of the eight groups prepared for our gallery walk.
There were several different approaches. Some, like my group’s, were more traditional than others, though we did incorporate the idea of end-of-term capstones. One group had a particularly attractive freshman course. It had a wonderful narrative rather than just being a collection of related units. It would be challenging to teach that course and maximize its potential as it would require teachers of a certain mindset, familiarity with a variety of disciplines, confidence, and flexibility.
We continue our work tomorrow and it will be interesting what elements of these ideas the team converges towards by the end of the day.
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Today, my AP Computer Science students began their final exam. While they were working through the multiple choice, I was reviewing their Create Your Own Critter lab and providing feedback. The lab is the summative lab for the GridWorld Case Study unit and has the following requirements:
Create your own critter which inherits from Critter. Be creative and think of some other things your critter can do that we haven’t done. You need to:
I love it when students go well beyond the requirements and create something amazing that is either really creative or challenges them. One student incorporated a shortest path finding algorithm into her lab!
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