January 8, 2013 at 10:38 pm
This week is the Consumer Electronics Show. No, I am not interested in the 105″ UltraHigh Definition TV. My living room is not quite big enough. I would love to play with the new LEGO Mindstorm EV3 which was unvealed at CES. Students at BUA have been playing with the Templeman PlaySurface, which is also […]
November 26, 2012 at 6:04 pm
As US News and World Report just wrote
November 15, 2012 at 9:57 pm
I spent the day at the Massachusetts Association of Science Teachers annual meeting in Boxborough. While at the meeting, I gave a one-hour workshop on InterLACE. One topic that came up was the debate between mastery of content (needed for MCAS testing) versus science processes (Common Core Standards and National Science Standards). Any bright kid […]
November 12, 2012 at 6:53 pm
This past Friday I was at the joint meeting of the New England Sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society held at Williams College. This was a great meeting where two of the invited talks on Friday were about the Higgs Boson, both from a theoretical and experimental point […]
October 29, 2012 at 9:45 pm
This past week the students explored the ideas of “vectorial motion” or what we now call momentum. We explored the ideas of the force-impulse relationship. Here you can see Sara H. throwing an egg at a sheet, yet it does not break, as the time of impact is slowed. Later in the period we […]
October 29, 2012 at 9:36 pm
I wanted to post a link to some BU undergrads who got to fly in Ellington Field in zero gravity. They are members for the BU SAT group. Every summer 1-3 BU Academy students actually work as part of this group. This past summer, Harrison K. worked in the group and he is doing his […]
October 18, 2012 at 10:23 pm
This morning I visited a calculus class at BU taught by Professor Brian Lukoff. Brian works with Eric Mazur at Harvard and uses the peer instruction model. He taught his class using Learning Catalytics. Similar to InterLACE, the teacher would ask a question. Each student (instead of groups of students) had their own laptop and […]
October 17, 2012 at 8:06 pm
The main excitement of the week has been a treasure hunt. The students were challenged to work together and have their robots venture out into the Earthquake prone landscape known as the physics classroom to find buried house-points. I will confess, one House was able to get their robots to the treasure in 50 minutes. […]
October 11, 2012 at 7:19 pm
So this week, they awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. David Wineland from U. Colorado received the prize for his work in Quantum Optics. 17 years ago when I was applying to grad school for Photonics programs, I was actually decided between Colorado, Arizona, and B.U. That was just when Colorado was making a lot […]
October 4, 2012 at 9:49 pm
So I just finished reading the first drafts of the introductions of the physics students lab reports. After reading and giving feedback on almost 50 of these reports, my mind is numb. A few of the students are naturals. The rest, we have only four years to get them to the point where they can […]
