AP Physics: Lots of Wrap-Up

Today was a lot of wrapping things up. We started by whiteboarding both the accelerated disk and free fall Direct Measurement Videos with some brief discussions about each. At this point, I was just trying to get students to recognize the parallels between angular acceleration and linear acceleration, so that didn’t feel too rushed. The discussion on free fall did skip over some important points, so I’ll be revisiting that topic next week. This is the first year I’ve included uncertainty in my class, and I could tell during the discussion that my students are starting to internalize those concepts, which added some nice layers to the discussion.

We also took some time to try and finish the lab practical we started Monday. Students are rolling a steel marble down a ramp with the goal of landing it in a tumble buggy driving by. Today, I threw them for a loop by adding that they need to pull off the same thing with glass and acrylic marbles, but the only new measurements they can take are mass. With the time for discussions, only a few groups got to test, so I’ll be making some adjustments next week to make sure students have a chance to finish.

Earth Science: Review

Students have another quiz tomorrow, so I repeated my review activity from last time. Students worked in groups to write a few questions for each learning target, then periodically traded whiteboards with another table to try and answer another group’s questions. This time, students were coming up with some deeper questions, which was great to see.