Physics: Mistakes Game

Students whiteboarded yesterday’s problems including at least one mistake. Its been a little while since I last had students do this, and a lot of students were excited to do it again.

Since everything we’ve done so far has been vertical springs, I sent up a ramp with a cart attatched to a spring so we could look at position vs. time graphs compare the period at different angles as a way to see how “changing gravity” affects the spring’s period. In spite of having the equation, a lot of students expected gravity to matter because they thought there had to be a force to de-compress, not recognizing that the spring could exert that force since we’ve mostly looked at stretching springs.

Chemistry: Molar Mass Introduction

Students got the mass of individual nuts, bolts, and washers, then predicted the masses of various combinations. Compared to last trimester, I took some extra time debriefing after the lab and tried to be very explicit that the hardware was being used to represent individual atoms, since we can’t observe individual atoms directly.