AP Physics: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded some torque problems. I can tell the last week or so has been a little disjointed; I had a lot of students trying to use Universal Gravitation to find the force of gravity in the torque problems and some were having trouble with what we meant by the radius. I spent some time talking with those groups how to decide when to use each version of the force of gravity equation, and that helped resolve things.

Physics: Springs

Students wrapped up collecting data for the period of a spring. I overheard a great conversation in a lab group; one student was griping a little about collecting data for the mass since he was convinced it shouldn’t matter based on the pendulum lab. Once they had a few data points, though, there was a moment when he lit up and made a beautiful connection to energy transformations to explain why mass mattered.

Chemistry Essentials: Stoich

We got the hardware out again to start stoichiometry. Students assembled nuts, bolts, and washers into “molecules” and predicted how many grams of each molecule they should have after a chemical reaction. The manipulatives seemed to help a lot of students wrap their heads around what is going on in a stoichiometry problem, which I’m hoping will translate into success with the paper and pencil problems tomorrow.