AP Physics 1: Buggies Redux

Today we repeated the buggy lab, but with a focus on preparing whiteboards that would make a meaningful comparison across groups. I had each group collect data for a standard buggy moving forward from zero and one other variation. One thing I’m really excited about is several groups played with ways to represent multiple trials on a single graph and one group came up with Frank Noschese’s effortless error bars on their own, which will be a great introduction to uncertainty.

Two variations

Graphing two trials

Physics: Dowels

This class is also doing two rounds of the first real lab. Today, I asked students to use a bunch of small dowels to collect data that would let them predict the mass of a much larger dowel made out of the same type of wood and represent their data on a whiteboard. The majority of groups used proportions, which was great, but very few measured multiple small dowels on their own and no one thought to try a graph. In most labs, I ask students to find a relationship, and I wonder if that would be a more interesting prompt here.

Chemistry Essentials: Coffee Can

We did the exploding coffee can demo to introduce particle diagrams. I had a few students who were really willing to propose ideas to explain the changes in the can’s behavior as the flame burned, which was awesome.