AP Physics: Mistakes

Since my students are pretty confident on motion graphs, we went straight to mistakes whiteboarding with some stacks of motion graphs. Students were pretty successful at coming up with interesting mistakes. In addition, during the presentations there was a lot of joking around and students were very willing to own unintentional mistakes, which was great to see.

Physics: Force of Gravity

Students collected data for a relationship between mass and the force of gravity. One of my classes was able to get their graphs and linear regressions done, and were more successful than I expected at “translating” their line of best fit into physics by adding units to the slope and intercept and replacing x and y with appropriate variables.

Chemistry Essentials: Periodic Trends

Today, I handed out periodic tables and students worked on marking them up based on some of the patterns and trends we’ve been talking about the past few days. Yesterday, several students noticed that the sodium card said it reacts strongly with water. Since many also recognized sodium is in table salt, they weren’t entirely convinced it would react with water, so I got out the pure sodium today to drop a piece into some water. I got a small flame during class, which really blew their minds.