AP Physics 1: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded yesterday’s problems for a gallery walk.They are definitely taking to velocity vs. time graphs very quickly.

Physics: Assessment

Students took their assessment on balanced force problems today. We’ve been using weekly packets, and including a groupwork reflection at the end of each packet. We’ve been consistently using the same three questions, but switched to a rubric from Colleen Nyeggen for a change of pace. Several students were very vocal that they liked that the switch pushed them to think a little differently about their participation this week.

Chemistry Essentials: Isotopes

This course usually includes the fairly classic penny isotope lab where students figure out the ratio of pre-1982 pennies to post-1982 pennies in a sealed container, but the math always felt like a black box in this course, so I came up with an alternative. Today, I tried having each group find the average mass of a random sample of pennies, then comparing that average to the mass of each type of penny. Groups really consistently saw that their average was closer to the typical mass of the type of penny they had more of, which lead nicely into identifying the most common isotope of elements on the periodic table. The key moment seemed to be when I had students whiteboard their average mass and which type of penny they had more of.