PhysEx is an opportunity for high school girls (and guys!) to learn about becoming a physicist. Students will have the chance to see the in’s-and-out’s of the life of a female physics major at MIT. PhysEx will be held Mar. 9th, from 10am-4pm on the MIT campus (see our website for me details). Events will include a discussion with a panel of current undergrads, lab tours and a poster session.
Last week I had the pleasure of sitting in on a group of teachers doing an evaluation callback for the Boston University Research Experience in Teaching (R.E.T.) Biophotonics program. In an R.E.T. program, middle and high school teachers spend the summer working alongside graduate students and professors in research laboratories. As the teachers met with the external evaluator, a common theme I saw expressed was that the content of their summer research was less important that the research experience itself. The fact that they were engaged in true inquiry based learning themselves, where nobody knew the answers to the research they were conducting, gave them the experience they wanted to expose their own students to. I had this research experience myself last year when I designed and flew my NASA reduced gravity experiment. The debate is raging of content versus science practices. State based standardized tests often emphasize content. The next Generation Science Standards have placed an emphasis on collaboration, inquiry based learning, and science practices over route memorization of content and lecture based teaching. How we get there is still something of an open playing field that the Physics Education Research community is trying to pave paths for us as instructors to travel.
I have spent the blizzard weekend doing a lot of planning for the spring meeting of the New England Section of AAPT. These are the kinds of issues that we will be exploring at this meeting. The workshops include a fun make n take with the photoelectric effect, InterLACE, and Modeling. Ron Thorton, one of the architects of MicrocomputerBased Learning Labs and Interactive Lecture Demonstrations will be giving the keynote address Friday evening.
Last week I had attended a BU Physics Teachers Alliance meeting, and Mark Greenman made a reference to Ronald Thorton and Interactive Lecture Demonstrations. However, now when you write a grant to NSF they do not want to see they word "LECTURE." Might as well be the death-knell for your grant. So he now calls them ILE, Interactive Laboratory Exercises (nothing has changed) and the granting agencies are happy.
By Gary Garber|Posted in Physics|Comments Off on The genuine inquiry based learning experience for teachers
I spent the day at the Massachusetts Association of Science Teachersannual 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 can master content. But what the National Academy of Sciences wants are young minds who can innovate, be creative, argue for their ideas, and solve problems. Traditionally, a body of knowledge is presented and memorized. Canned experiments with a detailed procedure and guaranteed success are performed, producing human computers with a body of knowledge who can set up equipment but lack the imagination or fire in the belly to do new science. Failure causes us to revisit and revise. Failing is okay! When one solution does not work, one must rely on creativity to generate a new solution. Of course, time is a major constraint on the number of iterations we can perform. I spent over 12 months analyzing my data from my Reduced Gravity Pendulum experiment. My students do not have that luxury of time.
Last Friday afternoon, while I was away at the physics teachers meeting, the students had a field day sans adult supervision in my classroom. I was a bit miffed Monday morning when I came in to a somewhat trashed physics classroom. Their genuine panic arose over trying to finish lab notebooks and have perfect calculations so they can get a perfect A+ and get into Haverford, Swarthmore or Bryn Mawr. What is often ignored is the reason for a lab notebook. Not to get an A+ and impress me with great calculations and the right answer and to prove that Momentum is Conserved (I had no idea!), but to be a record of their work for future science students. I have a shelf full of exemplary lab notebooks from future years. The students who performed the cookie cutter collisions experiments with ultrasonic motion sensors have an easy job ahead of them, they have a body of 14 years of Academy students' experiments to build on. Ahh, but the ones who took not the path less taken but the path never even tried. The students who tried to be creative in their experimentation, took a risk, and maybe failed. The question is, "what went wrong" and "what would you do next time?" Ask any graduate student. If all you had to do was perform a few canned experiments and write an extensive lab report, you could get a PhD in six months. The important thing in their lab notebook is not the failure but the process, the record of what they did and how to improve on what they did. So if their lab notebook goes up on the shelf, students next year can build on their work, similar to the way science is performed in research laboratories all over Boston University. I hope the students learn to be creative in science, be able to document their work, and collaborate with other students. If they can do that, they have a future in science.
To be honest, I am bored reading lab notebooks with perfect experiments with late 20th century technology. They are all the same. I want to read something new. I want to learn what can be done with a Touch Table? What can be done with Image Analysis? Show me something I don't know.
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 of view. At the dinner banquet I was sitting next to David Hammer discussing pedagogy. However, the primary dinner conversation at our table was amongthe several particle physicists at the table including David Tucker-Smith (Williams), Martin Schmaltz (Boston University), Kyle Cranmer (NYU), and Adam Falk (President of Williams). A lot of the talk was of the Higgs Boson, and stayed tuned. This Wednesday there will be a breaking announcement with a new Higgs discovery! This was posted last week on YouTube by CernTV. At the meeting they talked about the uncertainty if we are looking at a particle of spin zero or spin 2 which is why we are not 100% sure they have the Higgs Boson. Let us see what they announce tomorrow!
During dinner I asked how I could explain the Higgs Boson and its relationship to inertia to my students. It was explained (to paraphrase and with my enhancement):We are familiar with forces which depend on position such as gravity and the electric force. We are familiar with forces such as air resistance which are proportional to velocity. Under turbulent conditions, the force of air resistance is proportional to the square of the velocity. The interaction of mass with the Higgs field is similar to a force which is proportional to acceleration. This is the only force which is proportional to acceleration.
So after 20 years of teaching students that inertia is not a force, I now learn that this explanation is not quite the entire story. My take away is not that I have been teaching student the wrong thing, but that our understanding of the universe is constantly evolving. David Hammer gave a great talk at this same meeting emphasizing that we need to focus on science practices over science content. This is particularly important because science is always changing!
It was a great meeting with excellent workshops . Many thanks to my colleagues at in the BU Physics department including Mark D. Greenman and Andrew Duffy for running workshops!
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 explored some bouncing problems involving cricket bats and balls. To hit a ball with a bat you need to account for the vector nature of momentum. The bat first stops the ball, and then sends it back into the field.
The final thing you will see in the below video is the bouncing tennis ball demo where the tennis ball gains momentum from its collision with the basketball!
This coming week we are going to do experimentation with momentum using various collisions. Simple one-dimensional collisions we can observe with dynamics carts. But to quantitatively analyze two-dimensional collisions will take something advanced like a Playsurface from Templeman Automation. Here you can see Chris Templeman installing PlaySurface (a touch table) in our classroom. He is joined by Steve Boardman, a graduate student from the CEEO at Tufts who is developing software for the PlaySurface. Harrison and Andrew helped us set things up. Hopefully one of them will figure out how to program it.
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 senior thesis research with them. I would say since 2005 we have had about a dozen BUA students working there. This is a student built satellite which is competing with other universities in an Air Force competition to design and launch something space-worthy.
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 would answer the question. The professor could display their answers on the projection screen and discuss their answers. Although I did not stay for it, one of the hallmarks of LC is that it pairs up students with different answers to debate the questions. Sitting at the back of the lecture hall, I was amazed how when using LC the students were focused. But the instant the professor started to lecture/explain how a problem work, the entire class went onto Facebook.
After school, down at the robotics lab, Anita Sengupta, a NASA engineer and BU Engineering alum (class of '98) talked to our students about the Mars Curiosity mission. In the above photo you can see Dr. Sengupta with our students. Dr. Sengupta designed the parachute for the mission, which has to slow the lander through supersonic speeds.
Here you can see one of our mentors, Thomas holding a prototype of the parachute.
From the lab, I went to the BUA Donor Leadership dinner, where I learned the art of Sabrage from Eric Vogt. Eric teaches a class in Wine tasting at Harvard and gave us an interesting lesson in Bordeaux tonight. Here we can see Eric explaining Sabrage and a challenge to physics students.
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. The trick here of course was to use vectors to find the treasure, as opposed to literally following all of the steps of the treasure map. There have been a variety of vector solutions to this problems. I won't say more, as some houses have not completed the challenge....
Having said that, given the mild quake we had last night, I also challenged the students to calculate just how far North and East from the physics classroom is Lake Arrowhead, the epicenter of last night's 4.2 magnitude quake.
By Gary Garber|Posted in Physics|Comments Off on Vectors and Earthquakes
