Unit 1 - Relationships (in Physics)

So, Unit 1 was where we learned how to "whiteboard", how to circle up & have a scientific discourse (aka how to argue without arguing), & hopefully the best ways to drive to & from the Kent ISD building.  This was our training stage, & it took a day & a half.

So after we got our huge binders & our name tags (left out on the table where we signed in), our science notebooks were handed to us.  Both the presenters & previous workshop participants emphasized the importance of the notebook as a future reference so hopefully I take good & useful notes!

We spent the rest of the day doing labs about relationships.  The lab directions are purposefully vague ("vague enough to get started") & therefore open-ended, which means different groups approach things in different ways.  For instance, in the first lab, my group had 2 meter sticks so to find the relationship between inches & centimeters, we just put the 2 sticks together & looked at the lines.  (Actually, I'm pretty sure that was Kal's idea.)  Don came around & made a suggestion or 2 but other than that he was pretty hands-off.  Another group only had 1 stick & so they measured things -- a laptop, a book, etc -- in both units.  Here is the whiteboard with my group's results:

To make the whiteboard, we had minimal instructions: include the T-chart & graph, write a "for every" statement, & have the formula.  (O, & multiple colors.)  The discussion of this led to 1) what should go on the horizontal axis, & why, 2) the difference between in/cm & cm/in, 3) the process rather than just checking with Google, & 4) what should be included in future whiteboards.

Then our groups got rearranged.  This is a fantastic idea for cohort building (I know from experience people will end up with their favorites unless you move them around on purpose) -- I had a class last year where making a seating chart was really tricky because of all the interpersonal drama (yay, teenagers) so maybe I'll have to be more brave with group assignments next year.

Our next activity was a relationship smorgasbord -- how is the length of the string related to the time it takes a pendulum to swing, how is the mass of a cup filled with mystery items related to the number of items, etc.  A couple of the labs used "area-ometer" paper -- Even if we knew how to calculate the area of a circle, we had to draw the circle out on square-centimeter graph paper & *count* how many squares.  I don't think I've ever done area in real life before.

After we took all the data (my group didn't get to the 2 pendulum options, sadly -- my lab titles were pit-&-the-pendulum inspired, of course), we were assigned 2 to whiteboard.  & of course the choices of which ones to graph, etc weren't random -- Laura wanted us to uncover particular shapes of lines & particular equations.  (Major types were already on the board.)  The biggest thing here was trying out different graphing software.  I'm pretty sure my school doesn't have any of the Vernier software (http://www.vernier.com/products/software/lp/) so I was excited to find out about Plotly (https://plot.ly/).  Unfortunately, it's not as powerful or as useful as Excel, which my teacher laptop has but my students' ChromeBooks don't.  So that will either take some finagling of which experiments to ask for or some computer lab time.

[Aside: The price of Vernier's Logger Pro 3 is really pretty cheap.  I've sent an email to our IT guy & if it'll work with ChromeBooks, I might just donate it to the school.  The union rep where I interned said to never spend your own money on your classroom but honestly, I want good equipment, even if I have to pay for it.  If I had thought about this earlier, before I submitted my budget for the year... but o well.]

Ooo, & here's the whiteboards my group did.  I didn't even think to get pictures of all the action.  (Trying to balance the weight & the baseball was kind of challenging & might have been photogenic enough...)  To get the 10-fold increase for the circle's area, Don measured the clock on the wall -- at a student suggestion.  The need for that range will be something I stress...

< meter-stick balance with a baseball



diameter of circular lids vs area >











The final thing we did was read an article about the Force Concept Inventory, the pretest we all took that first morning.  (Hopefully we'll get our before-&-after scores back -- I'm sure this workshop will help me fill in gaps & misconceptions in my content knowledge.)  This test looks at how students conceptualize how the world works -- how gravity works, how air pressure works, how projectile motion works, etc.  Sadly, common sense & Newton don't agree on a lot, which is where the misconceptions come in.  Also sadly, most teaching methods (with the notable exception of modeling) don't do much to alter those misconceptions.

What's up next: Playing with tumble buggies!