Pedagogue Padawan 180

We are wrapping up the CVPM unit and today we presented and discussed the most challenging whiteboards. The group that prepared the whiteboard for this problem did a great job:

A hungry bat finds the mother lode of flying insects between the headlights of two bicycles cruising towards each other through the Herrick Lake Forest Preserve. The bikes are 100 meters apart at the start and one has a speed of 8.0 m/s and the other a speed of 10.0 m/s. The bat has a speed of 20.0 m/s. Assume that the bat flies from the front tire of one bike straight to the front tire of the other bike, then turns around with no delay and heads towards the other bike. This is repeated until both bikes and the bat are at the same place. Determine how far the bat flies during this flying feast.

 ##cvpm ##whiteboarding 

Missed my afternoon classes to meet as all of the district’s physics teachers and decide our plan regarding AP Physics. Very pleased with our plans to have AP Physics 1 replace Honors and AP Physics 2 replace AP Physics B.

This morning, I picked up our freshly painted robotics trailer from our sister high school. It looks amazing. I can’t wait to see how sharp the blue decals look when applied!

Lots of CVPM goodness: position vs. time graphs, velocity vs. time graphs, motion maps, and mathematical models!

##cvpm ##whiteboarding

This is from Friday, but I didn’t download the photos from the camera until today. Last Friday, after school, Physics Club welcomed 42 junior high students for a ten-week Science under the Sea project. Over the next ten weeks groups of junior high students with high school mentors will design, construct, and test underwater remote-operated vehicles (ROVs). The Naperville Education Foundation (NEF) awarded us a grant that made this opportunity possible. It is going to be an amazing ten weeks for all involved!

Today, in AP Computer Science, I introduced JUnit-based unit tests in the BlueJ IDE. BlueJ makes it very easy to create unit tests and interactively generate test methods. I’m trying to emphasize test-driven development more this year, and BlueJ’s integration with JUnit will definitely help!

Today groups presented their whiteboards for the constant-velocity paradigm lab. Due to some guidance from me, each group had a different graph to share. By the end of class, we had six whiteboards on display that we had compared and contrasted.

##whiteboarding ##paradigmlab ##cvpm

I know I’ve been focused a lot on uncertainty lately, but I wanted to share a breakthrough that I shared with my students today. At this point in the year, students are comfortable with estimating measurement uncertainty and calculating it in a couple of ways. They are also comfortable with using the crank-three-times method to propagate uncertainty through a calculation. In previous years, this thread has unwoven once we started determining velocity from a position vs. time graph. What is the uncertainty of the slope? However, this year, I found a way to have LoggerPro calculate the uncertainty of the coefficients of the linear regression! While I had hoped this could be done from the specified error bars, I instead had to enter all trials into LoggerPro and then edit the Linear Fit Options to show the uncertainty. Now we can continue to focus on measurement uncertainty as we build our various models throughout the semester! I created some sample data to illustrate this technique with my class today:

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My AP Physics B class had their first lab practicum today. They had to hit a constant-velocity buggy on the floor with a projectile fired from a launcher on the counter . They characterized their system but were not provided the target distance at which to hit the buggy until today. We explored computational modeling as a tool to solve for the angle. Most groups were successful in that the projectile hit the ground at the proper distance, but they were off a little left or right of the buggy. One group, however, had a direct hit! (Playback is sped up at the beginning and filmed at 120 fps at the end.)

 ##cvpm ##capm ##practicumlab 

The first summative programming lab in AP Computer Science is to create objects within GridWorld. Students add Actor objects to the world and once they have the basics down, the are free to take their lab in a creative direction. Here’s what one student had by the end of class (he figured out loops).