AP Physics: Coulomb’s Law

Students worked on some problems using Coulomb’s Law. I was surprised at how challenging a lot of students found a problem that deals with the quantization of charge, but there were a lot of great conversations as students worked through that one.

Physics: Dissipated Energy

We moved into the video analysis portion of determining where a bouncy ball dissipates energy (my article about this activity was published in the January issue of The Science Teacher). Before they got their bouncy ball, groups had to tell me what specific measurements they would use from the video analysis; the groups that completed the worksheet from the past few days were very successful while the groups that left big portions of the worksheet blank really struggled. I had one group get really excited watching their video when they noticed the bouncy ball got less blurry at the top of each bounce since it showed the bouncy ball really does briefly stop at the top.

Chemistry Essentials: Compounds
Students observed iron and sulfur, eventually heating it in a test tube to make iron sulfide. They were very into burning the iron and sulfur. Afterward, I used their observations in the lab to introduce vocab for pure substances, mixtures, and compounds.