Day 83: Whiteboarding & Assessment

January 16, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Projectile Whiteboarding

We finally whiteboarded students’ results from Friday’s projectile motion activity using Pivot Interactives. We also made a lot of references to yesterday’s activity and how it fit with what we saw in the graphs. I always love this board meeting since things just click for students and projectile motion suddenly feels simple to them.

Physics: Bouncy Ball Whiteboarding

Students started whiteboarding the representations they’d sketched yesterday for a bouncing bouncy ball. We were only able to get through the energy bar charts today, but students started to make some connections that will help make more sense of the placed they struggled yesterday, like the v-t graphs.

Chemistry Essentials: Assessment

Students took their density retake and their gas laws quiz. It ended up taking the whole hour since we had shortened periods today. A lot of students told me they felt like they improved on density, which was the goal.

Day 81: Assessment & Whiteboarding

January 14, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Assessment

Students took their energy assessment. When they finished, they worked on wrapping up their projectile motion work from Friday.

Physics: Energy Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded their problems from Friday. Both classes were able to come to a consensus on what the answers should be and why.

Chemistry Essentials: Gas Laws Whiteboarding

We did a gallery walk to go over some gas law problems from last week. The numbers in the problems are pretty extreme to keep the math relatively simple, but that left room for students to be able to focus on what temperature and pressure mean at the particle level and to connect their conceptual understanding to the math they were doing. That’s a trade-off I’m okay with for now.

Day 80: Pivot Projectiles, TIPERs, and States of Matter

January 11, 2019January 14, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 2 Comments

The combined forces of a neck sprain and a cold got the best of me, and I ended up at home while my students worked with a sub.

AP Physics 1: Pivot Projectiles

I am as part of Pivot Interactive’s Chemistry Fellows program.

Students collected data in a Pivot Interactives video showing three views of a projectile to generate position vs. time graphs and velocity vs. time graph for the motion in each direction.

Physics: TIPERs

Students worked on some problems out of TIPERs using energy bar charts as a reasoning tool.

Chemistry Essentials: States of Matter

Students did a short reading out of the textbook to get an introduction to states of matter. My co-teacher also took advantage of how short the activity is to meet with each student about their grade so far.

Day 79: Projectiles, Graphing, & Gas Law Problems

January 10, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

AP Physics 1: Projectiles

Students worked through some questions I got from Michael Lerner to introduce projectiles by having students represent the motion of a falling object using key tools from each of the models we’ve covered so far this year. This day always makes me really happy I wait until the end of linear mechanics to do projectiles.

Physics: Graphing

Students worked on finishing up their data collection and graphing from yesterday’s kinetic energy lab. I was really excited about how many students recognized on their own that they would need to linearize this data; even groups that had data that looked fairly linear, which is common with this lab, realized their intercept would make more sense with a parabola than a straight line, which was awesome. January and February are always a tough time of year, and a clear reminder of how much my students have grown so far this year was just what I needed.

Chemistry Essentials: Gas Law Problems

Students worked on solving problems using the gas laws. First trimester, I switched from using the formulas to having students use proportions to solve the problems, which helped make the math more accessible. This trimester, I added a question where students had to determine whether the unknown quantity should increase or decrease based on their particle diagrams, which made a big difference for students when deciding whether to multiply or divide to get their answer.

Day 78: Bouncy Balls, Kinetic Energy, & Board Meetings

January 9, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

AP Physics 1: Bouncy Balls

My article on this lab is in the Jan 2018 issue of The Science Teacher.

Students wrapped up their video analysis of a bouncy ball’s motion and started working on CER statements to answer what interaction dissipates the energy. I ended up doing more coaching than I usually do; I usually manage to squeeze this in before winter break, so I think it was just too long since students had been using free-body diagrams or velocity vs. time graphs. Nevertheless, students got to an answer today which was my goal.

Physics: Kinetic Energy

We had a pre-lab discussion and students collected data to work on a relationship between kinetic energy and speed. I found that a lot of students were confused about how to figure out the kinetic energy of the cart once they got into their lab groups. We went through the calculation during the whole class discussion, but I’m wondering if it would have been worthwhile to get students sketching some diagrams on whiteboards with their lab groups to figure out how they could find kinetic energy to get everyone wresting with those ideas, rather than just the students who spoke up.

Chemistry Essentials: Board Meeting

We held the board meeting for both of the gas laws labs students completed on Pivot Interactives this week. This trimester, my co-teacher and I have been trying to ramp up the graph interpretation we ask students to do, and today was a nice opportunity to see it pay off. Students were very successful at attaching conceptual meaning to the slopes of their graphs and, with a few questions to nudge them along, were also able to connect the intercept of the pressure vs. time graph to absolute zero.

Day 77: Bouncy Balls, Mistakes Whiteboarding, & Gas Laws

January 8, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

I dropped the ball and didn’t take any pictures today.

AP Physics 1: Bouncy Balls

A large percentage of my students were on a field trip today. I had the students who were here work on the video analysis of a bouncy ball’s motion.

Physics: Mistakes Whiteboarding

Students did mistakes whiteboarding with energy bar charts.

Chemistry Essentials: Gas Laws

I am as part of Pivot Interactive’s Chemistry Fellows program.

Students used Pivot Interactives to collect data for a relationship between pressure and volume for a bubble in a vacuum chamber.

Day 76: Bouncy Balls, Bar Charts, & Quantitative Gas Laws

January 7, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Bouncy Balls

Students started a lab to determine what interaction is dissipating a bouncy ball’s energy (my article on this lab appears in the Jan, 2018 issue of The Science Teacher). Today was all about figuring out what kind of evidence might be useful, so students worked on sketching representations for the bouncy ball’s motion. I could tell I’ve been slipping on spiraling back to earlier concepts; students had a tougher time than I’d hoped sketching the velocity vs. time graph.

Physics: Bar Charts

Before diving in to some problems sketching energy bar charts, we did a quick round of representations jeopardy. Each group came up with a scenario, then sketched a set of energy pie charts and a matching set of energy bar charts to describe that scenario on a whiteobard. Then, they gave their whiteboard to another group who had to come up with a scenario that fit with the representations on the whiteboard they got.

Chemistry Essentials: Quantitative Gas Laws

I am as part of Pivot Interactive’s Chemistry Fellows program.

Students used Pivot Interactives to collect data for a relationship between the temperature of a gas and its pressure. This is a great example of the kind of lab I really like Pivot Interactives for; it makes a nice graph, but we just don’t have the equipment to try this lab. Its not as visually interesting as some of the other labs on Pivot, but it is still clearly an actual lab and not idealized, simulated data. Students made some nice connections to their qualitative observations made using syringes last week.

Day 75: Free Response, Mistakes Whiteboarding, & Vacuum Chamber

January 4, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Free Response

Students worked on a released free response problem, then used a scoring guide to review their work. The problem calls for sketching an energy vs. position graph, which we haven’t used, but a lot of students immediately started sketching energy bar charts and were able to reason out what the new representation should look like based on their work, which was a lot of fun to see.

Physics: Mistakes Whiteboarding

Students did mistakes whiteboarding with yesterday’s problems using energy pie charts. Yesterday, they were very successful at solving the problems and today their confidence started to match.

Chemistry Essentials: Vacuum Chamber

To practice connecting particle diagrams to observations, students sketched particle diagrams and made predictions for various scenarios related to pressure and gas laws, many in a vacuum chamber, then we tested each out and discussed the predictions.

Day 74: Mistakes Whiteboarding, Pie Charts, & Particle Diagrams

January 3, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Mistakes Whiteboarding

Students did mistakes whiteboarding with yesterday’s problems. Energy is clicking nicely for a lot of students, which is great to see. One challenge I’m running into is I’ve got some students who have been struggling to connect variables to physical quantities, and are having trouble making sense of all the different quantities that show up in energy problems. I need to give some thought to how to help these students work on doing more sense making, as well as how I might prevent a similar situation next year.

Physics: Pie Charts

Students worked on some problems sketching energy pie charts. They were pretty successful at identifying the main types of mechanical energy, but placing dissipated energy in the pie charts got tricky. I think my students have a good sense for what the mechanical energy forms are, but not a clear sense of what dissipated energy is. I need to think about how I can help them clarify that idea.

Chemistry Essentials: Particle Diagrams

A lot of my students have been struggling to use particle diagrams in their thinking, so we spent some time today sketching particle diagrams to use the qualitative gas laws we have so far to make predictions about a variety of situations. We also spent some time in whole-class discussion using PhET’s gas properties simulation to define pressure and temperature in terms of particle behavior, which seemed to help.

Day 72: Tests

December 21, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Today was our last day of class before winter break. In all three of my classes, we wrapped up a topic by taking an assessment.

AP Physics 1: Energy Bar Charts & Unbalanced Forces

I’ve been giving students at least two in-class opportunities on every learning target this year, so this assessment covered energy bar charts and revisited unbalanced forces. Almost everyone improved on unbalanced forces, which is exactly what I want to see!

Physics: Conservation of Momentum

Students took their conservation of momentum test. Students have been saying the bar charts make the math very intuitive, and it definitely shows on the work I’ve graded so far. This is definitely the easiest time I’ve seen students have with momentum.

Chemistry Essentials: Density

This assessment was more hit or miss than my other classes. I had some students who did great, but a few were surprised to see some representations, like particle diagrams and a mass vs. volume graph, that were significant components of our daily work. I’m thinking about doing some individual conferences with students after break to try to get a better understanding of what’s behind that.