We didn’t get as far as I would have liked, but we had a lot of fun this week. As we are a bit behind my aspirations I will be giving an off-day for homework early in the week to play catch up. So check out the revised HW syllabus.
Lessons of the week. We had an interesting experiment where we measured mass using a pan balance and weight using a scale. I purposely did not provide enough equipment to see what level of cooperation there would be among the students. Would they work together and exchange equipment or idly sit around twiddling thumbs waiting for equipment to be freed up. The latter tended to dominate, and I must confess, the micromanaging control freak in me who is used to the quickly finished canned laboratory experiments wanted to push things along. But I think the lesson was learned that cooperation is needed not only among lab groups but between lab groups. On the rare occasion I saw some exchange of ideas. I didn’t see any exchange of actual data. The traditional inhibition taught in middle school is that all students most do their own work and that cooperating and sharing of data must be cheating. A myth we need to dispel.
Next up, LEGO Mindstorm robots, programming in LabView, and designing an experiment to measure velocity!
