AP Physics: Levitating Globe

The approach I’ve fallen into in order to give students time for their final projects while embedding some review for the students who will be taking the AP Physics 1 exam on the make-up date. Today, I got out a globe that floats in a magnetic stand and asked students to predict what should happen to the reading on a balance when the globe is removed, an idea I got from Kelly O’Shea. One group did a thought experiment where the magnet was replaced with a spring supporting the globe to reason their answer and had a great conversation.

Physics: Pinhole Viewers

We discussed some of the results of yesterday’s lab, focusing on how a ray diagram can explain the observations students made. Students are pretty quickly getting then hang of making sense of these diagrams.

Chemistry Essentials: Hollow Pennies

Students did a conceptual lab practical on activity series today. I gave students an activity series for metals, then asked them to predict whether copper or zinc is more likely to react with hydrochloric acid. Then, I gave each student a penny with a wedge filed into it to test their prediction. I also showed students the hollow remnants of a penny that had been left in 12M hydrochloric acid for a few hours.