AP Physics: Board Meeting

Students whiteboarded their results from yesterday’s Pivot Interactives activity. Students spent a lot of their time yesterday on whether the location of the collision affects whether linear momentum was conserved, but had a lot of interesting approaches and good discussion about that question. For the portions of the activity specific to angular momentum, I ended up much more teacher-directed than I like since I will be out tomorrow and am feeling the time crunch of the looming AP exam.

Physics: Pendulum Practical

Students finished yesterday’s practical, then were tasked with finding the period of a pendulum without using a ruler or meterstick. Not surprisingly, most students declared the pendulum practical was much easier than the spring one.

Chemistry Essentials: Percent Yield

Students predicted how much carbon dioxide should be produced in a reaction between baking soda and hydrochloric acid, then found the percent yield by measuring how much mass was “lost” during their reaction. I like that this lab circles back to conservation of mass to measure the mass of gas produced, but a lot of students had trouble connecting the lab to the stoichiometry problems we’ve done, so I need to think about how the layout and wording of the lab may be making those connections more difficult.