Day 18 - Should Stories be True?

http://www.cartalk.com/content/cruisin-grandmas-house

I've used the Car Talk Puzzler linked above in past years. This year I decided to add a personal spin to the story. I changed the girl in the story to a girl I knew in high school. She had a bad accident in her Pontiac Fiero and then her dad bought her a Suburban. I used her as the example in the story totally changing all the details to match the puzzler but embellishing it with details from my high school experience.

A good friend of mine uses stories from his personal life all the time to help teach physics. When I've been in PD sessions he runs he breaks them out and they are great. They are entertaining and very engaging. He paints pictures you can see and then references the characters while making points long after he's finished his narrative. It looks like a powerful teaching tool.

In my example of this I have some moral pangs about changing history in order to teach physics. Is it ok to totally change a story and the present it as true in order to teach?

Day 16 - Modeling Depolyments

Working through the Modeling Deployments in The Constant Velocity unit. Not much to say other than I really do think when they are used well they really can help students learn. I don't think I did a good job today, I led way too much.

Day 14 - TI-Nspire

I've always been impressed the old TI-83&84 graphing calculators as tools for analysis in physics. The TI-Nspire is even cooler. Our math department has decided that all students need to have this calculator so I get to benefit from them having it as well.

For graphing data I like this better as students can name the columns with their variables, with the older TIs they would just be L1 and L2. For the novice learners, I think this will be important. My only major gripe is they still can't do a Variable Power Regression.

For the more astute, you may have noticed the Nspire doesn't come in blue. Apparently they do make rubber skins for them to offer a bit of protection. The only other thing to know is they have a built in rechargeable battery. With the backlit color screen it doesn't seem to last as long as a TI-84 with AAAs, which means you need to have a charging cord handy on test days. There will always be at least one student per class who will need it.

Day 11 - Buggy Cars Day two

On day one of Buggy Cars all groups started with the cars at 0m. On day two I give them a second starting point and even have some of them run their cars the other way. I love the Buggy Car labs, but I do have to say the constant beat of the metronome haunts my dreams!

Day 10 - Buggy Cars Day One

Today was our first day with the Buggy Cars, marking the beginning of our Constant Velocity Unit. Tomorrow will be even more fun when we get a chance to discuss and redesign our investigations to support our model building.

Today students decided on which variables to measure so I'm sure I'll see some interesting stuff. Tomorrow I'm confident we'll settle on distance and time.

Day 9 - Grading

I had a cold all weekend and finally got around to grading Friday's quiz this morning. I'm always amazed at how students solve problems. In this case students had to find the slope of the line that would explain this data set. What I found surprising was this approach to finding the slope. I had four or five different students do this. They totaled up the data in each column then divided one by the other.

I find this interesting because I have no idea why a student would approach this problem in this way. Often when I see several students taking the same approach to solving a problem I can figure out what the thought process was, but in this case I can not. As I type this I realize I should probably ask one of them to explain why they tried this approach. Unfortunately I've already passed the quiz back and I didn't note down the students who did this. In the future when I see something that baffels me about student thought process I need to make a note and then do a quick post quiz interview.

Day 4 - y-intercept

This is one of my favorite data labs because the y-intercept is non-zero and has a real meaning.

Day 3 - Whiteboarding

In physics we do a lot of work in small groups on whiteboards. Today we started a mini-data lab investigating the relationship between the length of a pipe and its mass. It's a pretty straight forward idea, however, it will help us build the skills we need to lay the foundation for the rest of the school year.

Day 2 - Pre-Testing

Boring picture, but important day! Today I administered the Force Concept Inventory to my students. This is a 30 question multiple choice test designed to assess understanding of Newton's Laws. There is a great deal of research backing it up. I'll give it again near the end of the year to gauge how well I did as a teacher.

Day 1 - Marshmallow Challange

Today we did the Marshmallow Challenge. It was a lot of fun to see how the different groups went about it. What a great Day One activity.