AP Physics: Board Meeting

Students whiteboarded their results from the 2nd Law Lab and we had a board meeting. Students needed a reminder to translate the equation for their lines of best fit into “physics terms”, but they are getting more skilled at that. I was also pleased with how quickly students picked up on things like which groups had similar slopes, which made it easy to build some ideas like why the slopes would change.

Earth Science: Hurricane Tracking

Students used some data from 1992’s Hurricane Andrew to plot its path and answer a few questions. They did a nice job connecting what they’ve learned about heat and wind so far to find some patterns in the hurricane’s path and wind speed, but the plotting took a long time. I’m debating whether I want to try and streamline the plotting next year so students can spend more time on the interpretation. It would be very easy to give them a completed map of the hurricane’s path, but I would need to revise or eliminate some of the questions where students paused their plotting to make predictions. Another option would be to put the map into Desmos as an image, then have students type in the coordinates. With the manual plotting, I overheard some conversations where students were connecting coordinates on the map to coordinates on a graph, which is a great connection for them to make and I can’t decide whether Desmos would help or hurt that connection. I also need to identify the key take-aways from this lab to help decide where I want students to spend their time.