AP Physics: Board Meeting

We had the board meeting for last week’s ramp lab. Students were pretty successful at picking out the key concepts, though the results were a little messier than usual, which made it tough to compare results for different angles and cart masses. Next year, it may be worth having each group do two angles or two masses. I’ll also take more time to introduce students to the photogates. The students in calculus had some great reactions when they realized the slope of the position vs. time² was half the slope of the velocity vs. time graph.

Physics: Mistakes Game

Students played the whiteboard mistakes game with Friday’s free-body diagram problems. Lots of groups had great conversations about the forces on an object already moving and the language of interactions, including many of the ideas from the interaction stations, really helped them convince each other whether or not there should be a force. I also took a few minutes prior to presenting any whiteboards to talk about what it looks like to get something out of this when you’re not presenting, and saw a lot more students than usual with their own work out.

Board with intentional mistake for a ball at the peak of a throw

Chemistry Essentials: Periodic Table

We revisited Friday’s card sort. When I looked over students’ work from Friday, it looked like many of them got stuck on the word “pattern” in the directions because they were looking for something that was all the same, rather than a trend. Today, I had them get out actual periodic tables to use as a guide to set out the cards. From there, it was much easier to scaffold students to identifying interesting trends. Students were also really interested in things like how we discover new elements, or how they get named.