Pivot Interactives

Day 9: Board Meeting & Review

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AP Physics: Board Meeting

Students sketched their distance vs. time and angle vs. time graphs from the rotating disk Direct Measurement Video. I’d assumed students would just use the frames displayed in the video to find the time directly, but a lot of groups decided to treat when a dot was at a position of zero as t = 0, which gave us a good opportunity to talk about some experimental design decisions, which reinforced what the intercept represents on a graph like this.

 

Earth Science: Review

As a school, we’ve been working on having students write meaningful questions as part of our focus on Cornell notes. While I don’t do many notes, I decided to piggy back on this by having students write possible test questions for each learning target. Periodically, I had groups trade whiteboards and work on answering the questions another group had come up with. At this point, the questions were fairly superficial, which isn’t surprising since we just skimmed the surface of the topics in this unit and students haven’t had much practice or feedback writing questions yet.

Day 7: Angular Velocity & Currents

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AP Physics: Angular Velocity

I’ve decided to try embedding circular motion with kinematics, rather than introducing it as a separate unit, so today I introduced constant angular velocity. Students used a Direct Measurement Video of a rotating disk to plot both angle vs. time and distance vs. time for dots at different radii. I also introduced them to doing calculations in a spreadsheet since some of the number crunching they needed to do could be repetitive. Spreadsheets, high speed video, and some new physics was a lot to take in at once, so I gave more structure than usual, and my students rolled with it well.

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Earth Science: Currents

Students prepped whiteboards with their conclusions to yesterday’s lab using the claim-evidence-reasoning framework. Students seemed excited to share their work with the class. Afterward, we made some connections to ocean currents.

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Day 147: Joly Photometer & Energy in Reactions

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Physics: Joly Photometer

With over half of my students gone for another AP test today, I ended up giving them the hour to finish yesterday’s assignment with the Joly Photometer Direct Measurement Video. I’ll have a lot of students gone tomorrow for AP calc, so I need to figure out how I want to handle discussing the results of this and Monday’s lab.

Chemistry: Energy in Reactions

We talked about of yesterday’s lab, then took a look at energy changes in chemical reactions to start thinking about why some of the things we tried change the reaction rate.

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Day 146: Joly Photometer & Reaction Rates

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Physics: Joly Photometer

Students used the Joly Photometer Direct Measurement Video to find a relationship between light intensity and distance from a source. I could tell a lot of my students had an AP test yesterday; I spent a lot more time than usual discussing with lab groups what variables they should graph, how they should collect data on those variables, and how to interpret and linearize the graph. I think their struggles had more to do with how mentally fried the AP chem students were than anything else.

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Chemistry: Reaction Rates

Students timed a reaction between copper chloride and hydrogen peroxide under different conditions to determine what impacts the reaction rate.

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Day 132: Closed Pipes & Percent Yield

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Physics: Closed Pipes

Students whiteboarded their results from yesterday’s lab and we discussed the results. Afterward, students started working on finding a relationship between wavelength and the length of an air column needed for a standing wave, using the speed of sound from the video to get the wavelength of a tuning fork.

Chemistry: Percent Yield

I introduced the concept of percent yield and students started working through some problems. They also took a quiz on stoichiometry, which didn’t go as well as I hoped. Looking at their work, I think a lot of students lost track of what all the different numbers mean, so I’m tweaking some lessons for later this week to try and get back to the physical meaning of the numbers they are using.

Day 131: Speed of Sound & Speed Dating

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Physics: Speed of Sound

After some time playing with the wave generator to confirm Thursday’s lab results, students used a Direct Measurement Video to produce a position vs. time graph and find the speed of sound. Tomorrow, they’ll put that speed to use in closed pipe resonators.

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Chemistry: Speed Dating

Students needed just a little more practice to firm up their stoichiometry skills, so we did some whiteboard speed dating with problems similar to what will be on tomorrow’s quiz. I was really pleased at the number of groups who were really talking through problems , taking turns with the marker, and taking other steps to ensure that both students really understood what was going on.

Day 130: Standing Waves & Stoich Practice

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Physics: Standing Waves

Students used a Direct Measurement Video to look for patterns in the wavelengths and frequencies that can produce a standing wave on a string. I’d set up the wave driver this morning to try some ideas for Monday, and several students asked if they could try it to answer some questions the videos raised for them, but didn’t have a great way to answer.

Chemistry: Stoich Practice

Students finished up their stoichiometry practice problems today. I’m trying to really focus conceptually on what the math means, so we spent some time drawing repeated reaction diagrams to better connect the math to the lab they did a few days ago.

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Day 128: Wave Superposition & Molar Mass in Reactions

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I’m out today, so I’ll find out tomorrow how things actually went.

Physics: Wave Superposition

Students used a Direct Measurement Video to start exploring wave superposition. Since I’m not there to listen in on their conversations, I’m having them submit answers to some questions in Google Classroom so I can look over what my students are thinking before class on Wednesday.

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Chemistry: Molar Mass in Reactions

Students went back to the nuts, bolts, and washers to introduce the idea of stoichiometry. I made up a “reaction” using those three elements and provided a total mass available for one of the reactants. Students used the hardware as manipulatives to determine how much of the other reactants would be needed along with how much of the product would be produced. When I did this last tri, students tended to ignore the manipulatives, so I reworked some of the questions to try and emphasize how the physical nuts, bolts, and washers can be used to check an answer.

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Day 20: Board Meeting & Free Fall

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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

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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.

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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.

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