Physical Science: Groupwork Norms

As a follow up to yesterday’s Marshmallow Challenge, we had some discussion about the importance of mistakes and revision in building a tower, then compared that to learning science. Groups also reflected on what they did that helped them work together effectively. Those reflections lead to class-wide norms for group work. One suggestion was “Don’t copy someone else’s epic fails”; it got edited to “Learn from others’ mistakes”, but a piece of me wishes we’d kept the original wording.

Physics: Buggy Lab

Students collected data with the constant speed buggies based on the procedures groups planned yesterday. Just about every group ran into at least one issue that forced them to rethink the details of their approach. That lead to some great conversations within groups about balancing ideal data collection against what’s possible in the lab, including what makes data “good enough.”