AP Physics 1: Card Sort

Students whiteboarded two of the items from yesterday’s card sort that they found trickiest. Not surprisingly, the item with an air hockey puck that glides at a constant speed was a very popular choice. I didn’t tell students anything about what the vector addition diagrams represent and there was a great moment during one section’s discussion where a student said the new diagram really reminded him of vector addition in math.

Physics: Mistakes Whiteboarding

We did some mistakes whiteboarding with representations of objects with unbalanced forces. There was a lot of good discussion. I regretted not pushing students to draw acceleration arrows on motion maps, because this is a time when it would have really paid off.

On a side note, there were several problems about a passenger on an elevator. While the problem did not include any gendered language, about half the students who whiteboarded that problem changed passenger to “guy” or “man” while the other half stuck with something gender-neutral.

Chemistry Essentials: Formula Writing

We did a gallery walk of yesterday’s formula writing problems. Most students seem to be making sense of what the charges on their ion sheet represent and figuring out how to write the formulas. At the end of the hour, we spent some time going over the different representations we have and what the purpose of each is.