AP Physics: Toilet Paper

Students finished working on the lab practical we started yesterday. Students did a lot of connecting ideas, which was great. I added a question asking students to calculate the final velocity of their unrolling roll using the velocity time graph and using energy, which I’m hoping to use to introduce rotational kinetic energy tomorrow.

Physics: Snakey Springs

My plan was to whiteboard yesterday’s lab, but most groups had either a linear or quadratic relationship between wavelength and frequency; a lot of students seemed distracted during yesterday’s pre-lab discussion, and I should have taken the time to bring their focus back rather than plowing ahead. We took a few minutes to talk about whether the graphs groups have make sense, then revisited the pre-lab discussion and re-did the data collection. I’ve had some other labs this tri we needed to re-do because of poor results, so I need to think about how to do a better job of making sure the lab goes well the first time around.

Turns out my heavy ring stands work well for holding one end of a snakey spring

Chemistry Essentials: Limiting Reactants Hardware

We revisited the nuts, bolts, and washers and the “reaction” used to introduce stoichiometry to explore more with limiting reactants. I had a few students who were bothered that there isn’t a simple rule they can always use to immediately identify the limiting reactant, but they were still able to see the kinds of approaches I wanted them to.