AP Physics: Rubber Bands

Both sections worked on drawing interaction diagrams and free-body diagrams, but one of my sections is about 30 minutes ahead and was able to get the problems mostly done last week. That section had asked about what the graph looks like when a spring is overstretched and Hooke’s Law breaks down, so we got out some rubber bands to try. I told students I hadn’t had a chance to collect my own data, so we’d be finding out together, and they seemed on board with that.

Physics: CVPM Mistakes Game

Students played Kelly O’Shea’s mistakes game with Friday’s worksheet on translating between different representations of constant velocity. I really like this worksheet for introducing the mistakes game since its easy to direct students towards meaningful mistakes. I usually talk about some stems for good questions, but this time, I also projected them, which seemed to help. When the discussion lagged, I used Post-It notes to feed questions to students, but another student would usually ask the question I had in mind before I could finish writing, which is a good reminder to give them time.

Chemistry Essentials: Density Mistakes Game

This class played the mistakes game with Friday’s density problems. I also used the question stems with them, but they struggled a lot more with asking good questions. I think they need a little more scaffolding; I might put together a whiteboard and have students prep questions in their groups. A lot of students fell back into some of the behaviors I’ve been trying to push back against with the work on norms, and I think some of that was a result of some students feeling confused and frustrated with the discussion.