AP Physics: Kirchoff’s Laws

Students started working on a lab for Kirchoff’s Laws. They measured the current and voltage at different points in the circuit to start looking for patterns. I overheard some good discussion about how the results connect to the Ohm’s Law equation we got earlier this week.

Physics: Board Meeting

Students whiteboarded their results for the impulse lab, but the slopes of their graphs were way off from what I expected. A lot of groups admitted that once they got their hands on the equipment, they ignored that we were interested in the change in velocity, rather than just the maximum or the minimum. I need to think about how to adjust pre-lab discussions in this course to keep students focused on the key ideas. We were able to get some qualitative ideas about impulse in place from the results, but I decided to have students collect data again tomorrow to get a quantitative understanding.

Chemistry Essentials: Chemical Formulas

Students started writing chemical formulas given the name of the compound and the charges. I got out some beans for students to use as manipulative versions of Lewis dot structures, which helped a lot of students get beyond “flop and drop” when figuring out subscripts. Some students did get thrown by switching between electron diagrams and particle diagrams, so I need to work on keeping the types and purposes of diagrams distinct.