Around mid-day last Friday, we found out enough staff were out (almost all with COVID) that we would be remote this week. Monday was an asynchronous day so that teachers could post an assignment, then spend the rest of the day planning for the rest of the week. The rest of the week was synchronous following our usual bell schedule. We were required to have some synchronous instruction at the start of each hour, but were encouraged to make the rest of the hour something that students could do away from Zoom. In both my courses, I stuck to activities that should be doable in class time, but made them due at midnight rather than the end of class. I got really positive feedback from students since that gave them the option to take a break from their screen and do their physics later, especially for my classes in the middle of the day. That also meant I had time to look over their work before school and make some adjustments to the instruction I’d planned for the day. I think being transparent about how student work was informing my instruction also helped with work completion, since it gave students a clear reason to at least attempt the work on the day it was assigned.

Near the end of the school day on Thursday, we found out that next week will be remote, as well. Next week, I want to keep the same general structure since that seemed to work well for both me and for my students, but I want to try and get a little more student-to-student discussion.

Physics: Impulse

Our plan this week had been to introduce momentum and impulse. We normally start with a cart catching activity, where students find as many ways as possible to make it harder to catch a cart. That translated fairly well to an asynchronous lesson for Monday where we asked students to brainstorm ways they could change how difficult it was to catch a ball during a game of catch. I put all of the responses onto a Jamboard and did some sorting, which lead very nicely into a definition of momentum as well as the idea that force can chance momentum.

The rest of the week we relied heavily on Pivot Interactives (disclaimer: I work for Pivot Interactives writing activities). We started by introducing Newton’s 3rd Law, which we’d decided to save for momentum this year since that’s when students seem to do the most interesting and useful thinking with it, then did an activity where students evaluate two competing claims about what is transferred in a collision between two gliders on an air track. We haven’t done many of those kinds of questions this year, so students needed some support in figuring out what kind of evidence they needed, but it was mostly a matter of keeping them focused on the claim and not overcomplicating what to collect. The bit that got a little rocky is I tried to go from there to the impulse equation, which just didn’t flow naturally. I’ve thought about changing my momentum storyline to start with conservation, then narrow our focus to the individual objects that make up the system to look at impulse. In retrospect, a part of me wishes we’d made the leap when we switched to remote instruction since I think that storyline would have flowed better with the resources available to us, but sticking with the storyline we’d already planned took less thinking and will likely make for a smoother transition when we get back to in-person instruction.

AP Physics 1: Bouncy Ball Energy

As part of my energy unit, I’d planned to do an activity (shameless plug for my article on this activity in The Science Teacher) where students use video analysis to decide whether a bouncy ball dissipates energy primarily due to air resistance or due to the impact when it bounces. The hard part of this activity is prior to the video analysis, I have students do some whiteboarding where they sketch representations including LOL diagrams, free-body diagrams, and velocity vs. time graphs for the bouncy ball-Earth system first assuming only air resistance dissipates energy, then assuming only the impact dissipates energy. I ended up using a version of this activity I wrote for Pivot Interactives that replaces that whiteboarding with multiple choice questions. I have struggled this year with helping my students effectively use diagrams as thinking tools, so I think having them choose from a set of diagrams was a useful scaffold. I had the questions set to autograde, which made it easy for students to progress asynchronously, but I think some good discussion could have happened if I’d turned off autograding and instead had students use our synchronous time to discuss their answers and come to a consensus.