Day 62: Mistakes Game & Balancing Reactions

December 10, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physics: Mistakes Game

We played the mistakes game with yesterday’s conservation of energy problems. For students who had the other physics teacher last trimester, this was their first experience with the mistakes game. I was pleased with the way the students I had last tri took the lead, helping their peers come up with interesting mistakes and modeling good questions.

The mistake is a subtle sign error, but lead to some great discussion about determining whether an answer is reasonable.

Chemistry: Intro to Balancing Chemical Equations

I took advantage of the visuals in PhET’s Balancing Chemical Equations sim to introduce my students to this process. I had them start by playing in the introduction to figure out what the different representations tell them about the chemical equation. After students had some time to play, we came back together. My students were able to articulate pretty clearly what it means for a reaction to be balanced, and what it has to do with conservation of mass. Students then spent some time testing their understanding by playing the game built into the simulation. Based on the conversations I overheard as they played, students were getting a much better understanding of not just how to balance chemical equations, but what all those numbers in the equation mean. I was also pleased to see the confidence my students gained while playing the game. I think a lot of them have started to assume they don’t understand things in the classroom, so seeing that immediate, consistently positive feedback from the game helped them see the way they’re thinking about these reactions really is useful.

phet balancing

Day 44: Introducing Sound & Video Analysis

November 11, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

I was out for a field trip today, so no photos.

Physical Science: Introducing Sound

Students did some reading on sound waves today and started connecting it to what they’ve learned so far about waves in general.

Physics: Projectile Video Analysis

Students recorded videos of projectiles being thrown at different angles, then did some video analysis to see how that affects how high and how far the projectile travels.

Day 43: Snakey Springs & Video Analysis

November 10, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physical Science: Snakey Springs

After getting a few vocabulary terms for waves, students got out the snakey springs to start looking for qualitative relationships between wavelength, frequency, and amplitude. I was surprised at how impressed students were when they realized a wave reflects off the end of the snakey spring; as I make the course more inquiry based, I’m reminded how easy it is to assume students have certain experiences or background knowledge they just don’t have.

Physics: Video Analysis

Our awesome tech guy got Logger Pro working on the netbook cart, so today I introduced students to doing video analysis. As a class, we walked through analyzing a video of a tennis ball tossed straight up in the air so students would have some idea of what the results should look like. Tomorrow, they’ll record and analyze their own videos.

Day 37: Kirchoff’s Rules & Vector Addition Diagrams

November 2, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physical Science: Kirchoff’s Rules

With my 9th graders, I’ve always done series and parallel circuits pretty superficially where they try a few things in the lab, then memorize a couple of key behaviors. This year, my students have been thinking about the energy in circuits in some interesting ways that seem useful for getting at Kirchoff’s Rules, so I decided to give it a go. Today, students used PhET’s circuit kit to compare the voltage and current in different parts of each type of circuit. Students were able to articulate very nicely their own versions of Kirchoff’s Rules based on the energy in the circuit.

Physics: Vector Addition Diagrams

Today, students took their first look at forces in 2D and drew some vector addition diagrams to scale. The problems, lifted from Kelly O’Shea, were all on a grid to keep things straightforward. This gave students the opportunity to practice drawing vector addition diagrams and start thinking about what they mean without getting bogged down in the math. Tomorrow, we’ll start crunching numbers with the diagrams.

Day 35: Series vs. Parallel Circuits & Board Meeting

October 29, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physical Science: Series vs. Parallel Circuits

Students used PhET’s circuit construction kit to explore the differences between series and parallel circuits. When I’ve used batteries and bulbs, students really struggle to see (let alone articulate) what’s going on with the current, so the visible “electrons” in the simulation were a huge help in getting students to understand why certain changes happened.

Physics: Board Meeting

We discussed as a class the results of the Newton’s 2nd Law lab. I need to have students practice talking about the slope more; they were able to get to “The force needed to accelerate 1 m/s²“, but it took some pushing on my part; I think the issue is just lack of practice. I was pleased by the discussion; students are doing more articulating of the big ideas. I was really excited by the discussion students had about the intercept. I’d planned to declare the intercept zero and move on, but in both sections students seemed interested in talking about it. They decided it would be reasonable to have a non-zero intercept on this experiment and it would be equal to the amount of friction you have to overcome to start the cart moving.

Day 20: Board Meeting & Free Fall

October 5, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physical Science: Newton’s Laws Board Meeting

Students finished collecting data, then we had a short board meeting to agree on the qualitative relationships in Newton’s 2nd Law.

Physics: Free Fall

Students white boarded answers to a few qualitative questions about last week’s Direct Measurement Video. I emphasized having them provide evidence to support their answers, which lead to some good conversations, both in groups and in the whole class, about what makes “good” evidence. Different groups looked at different combinations of falling objects, which lead to some good disagreement about whether all objects fell at the same rate. My favorite moment was when I asked whether using the same acceleration for all objects is useful and a student quickly responded with “It depends” which lead to some good talk about uncertainty.

Day 18: Intertia & Free Fall

October 1, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physical Science: Inertia

After some brief notes on inertia, students did a lab where they played with some examples and practiced using inertia to explain their observations. At the end of the lab, students had a mini-design challenge to come up with a way to keep the passenger safe in a collision. Even though we don’t go into torque in the course, it did get students thinking about where the force is applied. I intentionally left the language in the question vague, and I was pleased with the conversations students had about what it meant to keep the passenger safe.

This group debated about the efficacy of their “seat belt” since the passenger’s “feet” still swung forward in the crash

Physics: Introducing Free Fall

We went to the computer lab for students to use a Direct Measurement Video to begin exploring free fall. This one allows students to watch side by side high speed videos of a variety of objects in free fall. I asked students to find a value for the acceleration of a falling object and to identify any variables that affects that acceleration. While many students were quick to dismiss small differences in the time, one group had a great discussion. They saw that the bowling ball fell noticeably faster than a ping pong ball, so they not surprisingly decided that weight must matter. One person wasn’t satisfied; he played the video of a large steel ball side by side with a small steel ball to show they fell at the same rate in spite of different masses and radii. With some nudging, they were able to agree that density must be the key factor.

Day 13: Graphing Challenge & Motion Maps

September 24, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physical Science: Graphing Challenge

To get a little more practice with position vs. time graphs before we move on to free fall, the class went to the library to play Matt Blackman’s Action Graphing. My strongest students whipped through the early levels and got some exposure to velocity vs. time graphs as well as some calculations on graphs that show acceleration, which I normally don’t go into in this course due to time. Some of my students who need a little more time to master things started out using a lot of guess and check in the game, but were able to calculate correctly and consistently by the end of the period.

Physics: Acceleration Motion Maps

Today, students drew motion maps and sketched graphs for variations on a sphere rolling along a ramp, then we got out the motion detector to check a few of them. I’ve got a number students who took AP Calculus BC last year who were able to work through most of the graphs pretty easily, but some of them retain some important misconceptions. I made sure we spent a lot of time on a cart that rolled up the ramp, then back down, because several students were adamant that a negative acceleration must always mean the object is slowing down. Even for some of the students who talk about velocity and acceleration as derivatives, the graphs for the cart going up and back down were surprising.

Day 5: Energy Conservation & Motion Maps

September 15, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

I forgot to take pictures during class today, so words will have to do.

Physical Science: PhET Energy Conservation

After going over the definitions students worked on Friday, we went back to the PhET skate park simulation to look more specifically at energy conservation. I had several different scenarios where I asked students to predict what the energy bar charts would look like for key positions of the skater. The plan was for students to then check each of their predictions using the simulation, but very few groups got to that point thanks to assorted tech issues. I overheard some great conversations where students were really digging into the definitions of the different types of energy along with the details of the skater’s motion to not only make predictions, but find evidence to make supporting arguments. Since it can be tricky to get computer access, I’m planning to project the simulation tomorrow to test the predictions as a class.

Physics: Intro to Motion Maps

Today students added motion maps to their representations of the constant velocity model and practiced translating between representations using the motion detector lab from the Modeling Instruction materials. Once they got rolling, most of my students seemed to get comfortable with this new representation pretty quickly. I think I drove a few of them a little nuts, though. Inevitably, students came up to me to ask if their answers were right and, rather than just saying yes or no, I tried to stick to asking questions about their representations. My goal during class is always to get students to think harder than me (at least about the physics), so I want to get them to analyze any work they aren’t confident about, even if their answer is already perfect. The trick is they’re used to only being asked to think about their wrong answers, so as soon as I started questioning a lot of students panicked and assumed they were way off. I started prefacing each conversation with a reminder that I was asking questions because I wanted to understand their thinking, not necessarily because their result was wrong. That little reminder seemed to help a lot of students to focus on what I was asking rather than immediately start searching for their mistake, which I think made the conversations more valuable even when their was a mistake for the student to find. I’m sure that as students get used to being asked to explain their thinking (and I get better at probing for their reasoning), the instinct to panic and start searching for the error will fade.

Day 3: Defining Types of Energy & First Board Meeting

September 10, 2015July 14, 2017 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Physical Science: Energy Types

Students used PhET’s Energy Skate Park sim to begin exploring energy. Their directions were to open up the bar graph, then find as many ways as they could to change the size of each bar. Tomorrow, their observations will lead into the definitions for kinetic and potential energy.

PhET’s Energy Skate Park

Physics: First Board Meeting

Students prepped whiteboards with their results from the Buggy Lab, then we had our first board meeting. I talked more than I wanted to during the meeting, partly because I was rushing to get students ready for a sub tomorrow and partly because I didn’t take enough time to set expectations or let students pre-discuss in smaller groups. Next time, I want to try using Casey Rutherford’s Observations, Claims, & Evidence structure to provide students with a little more scaffolding. My students were very willing to speak up and take risks during the board meetings, so I’m excited to see how future ones go!

Student whiteboard

Another student whiteboard

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