Gary Garber's Blog

Over the spring/summer I was fortunate to be working with one of the early EV3 kits and was able to write a book, which I think, will be ideal for FLL teams, both students and coaches.  The book contains step-by-step build instructions made with L-Draw, screen shots, and downloadable EV3 code.  I go into detail on using the Gyro Sensor, Motion Sensor, and Light Sensor.  I work through the basics of how to use loops, switches, MyBlocks, and math functions up to an intermediate level appropriate for FLL competitions.   The book works the reader through proportional line code for both the motion sensors and light sensors.  The book is available from Packt Publishing as a downloadable e-book.

For those of you in FLL, good luck with Nature’s Fury!

You can buy a Kindle version or a paperback version from Amazon.

Or you can get any digital format from Packt Publishing.

In physics last week we explored gravity and acceleration.  Often the students were frustrated with my vague smiles when I refused to answer their questions and forced them to put forth ideas whether they be right or wrong.   Why would I do this?  The lone sophomore in the class wisely said that we only learn from our failures!

LEGO couldn't agree more!  LEGO is having a webinar next week on why failure is an option!

"Every successful inventor has failed multiple times and learned from those failures. Students are often encouraged to succeed with one answer, but in the real world, it’s not about one answer. Companies want multiple answers to the same problem so that they can choose which fits the organization best. LEGO^® Education wants students to fail, and fail often, because it’s a critical part of how the creative and engineering process works, and helps them develop the tenacity and ability to adapt to change that is so highly valued by businesses – not to mention useful in life. When kids fail, they fail with recognition of what is at risk – equipping them with better risk-management skills and an improved understanding of what’s at stake."

You can watch a preview here.

So this year, the Freshmen really outdid themselves.  As I walked to the Academy from our morning All School Meeting I knew something was up as I looked up at my classroom and saw...the Planck's Plank.

As class started, I found myself with the need to defend myself from the the Pirate Ship Hufflepuff.

I survived my class with Hufflepuff, and they were rather well behave.  The brigands showed up in the next period.  The House of Raven was out in full force

They released the Kraken which had me shaking in my boots.

At that point I looked down and realized my poor hamster had been made to walk Planck's Plank.

I quickly raced outside to catch them before they fell into the surf.

Fortunately, my fears were alleviated when the HMS Raven and the HMS Garber sailed up to save the hamsters from Planck's constant.

The ships delivered a treasure chest full of cookies and I must say, this has been the best Pirate Day since 2007.

I do owe a debt of gratitude to the fine sophomores who I suppose inspired these brave new freshmen.

So, many thanks to the SS Raven for making my day.

I was also reading an old article in Scientific American on the Science of Pirates.   One interesting point in the article is that if you want to become a pirate, you could go to MIT.  We used to have a college counselor here named JT Duck, who we should ask about the swashbuckling types across the river.   As an assistant director of admissions at MIT he must know something about these brigands and scurvy scum.

Down in Washington, they were prepping for the pirate invasion tomorrow at the American Center for Physics.

Also, in the news, Judy Donnelly sent me a couple of good links last week. Some cool animation about physics.

And a good link to fighter jets rainbows.

On a sad not, the International Space Station is scheduled to come back down in 2020.  This article in the Washington Post argues for keeping it afloat.  It is actually a nice article on the future of NASA.

XKCD had a great data storage commentary on punch cards.  I remember as an undergrad, playing around a bit with a punchcard reader at the Wesleyan University.

I once attended a summer program in Daytona Beach for teachers at Embry Riddle University.  You can now go there to get a master's degree in Drone Warfare.  Hmmm, I bet the pirates would love that degree!

On the opposite side of Drones, Tesla motors is developing a 90% autonomous car.  The pirates would like one of those too.  Except an autonomous boat.

This week we finished out discussion of inertia and explored ideas behind statics and equilibrium.

I was impressed when I came in on Monday and found that Slytherin House hung a snake at the back of the room.  And one nice Slytherin 1st year (is that possible?) made some blueberry muffins.

This week we explored the ideas of net force, statics, equilibrium and normal force.We started by drawing free body diagrams of a hamster at rest on a table top.

From there we examined a hamster at rest on an inclined plane.

Thinking about an object at rest against a vertical surface we discussed a horizontal normal force on a bar of soap.

We finished by starting a brief experiment trying to measure both the mass and the weight of a set of mysterious objects.  Students measured weight using a variety of spring scales and force probes.  They measured mass using a traditional Greek balance!  A debate ensued as to why the balance was measuring mass and not weight.  Obviously gravity was involved.  In fact, this exact point was made in the Physics Teacher magazine last year criticizing this experiment as pure stupidity and misleading by a great physicist.  However, the one student pointed out that on Mars the balance would give the same reading, but the spring scale would give a different reading!

Another great use of LEGOS!

Next up, we are studying velocity.  Fortunately, we went bowling Monday after school so we were able to get some video footage of high speed bowling balls to analyze at Jillians.

In the news:

Laser Focus World has an interesting article on the future on LED Lightbulbs and how they could be healthy for us.  The idea, is that these new bulbs could change color based on whether you are falling asleep, waking up, or trying to be alert as possible.  They could actually help us regulate our daily life cycle.  Thanks to Judy Donnely for that tip.

NASA Wallops Island (Virginia) which has traditionally just launched Sounding Rockets out over the Atlantic is entering into Deep Space Launches and just sent a probe up and toward the moon which you read about on the AP.  There actually is a program where high school students can design projects to fly on Sounding Rockets shot out from Wallops Island.

This week after our brief introduction we explored the ideas of inertia in class.  One of the students expertly summer up what inertia is.  To quote her InterLACE posting "Objects are lazy unless you motivate them."  Of course, why are objects lazy?  If we look at our textbook definitions, it might say that inertia is just a property of matter.  For the curious who must know why, a few years ago, I might have said, "its a mystery, that is the way nature is, now stop asking so many questions."  Additionally, our textbooks emphasize that inertia is NOT a force, but a property of matter to resist forces.  The summer of 2012 they finally made experimental headway in finding the Higgs Boson, which is believed to be responsible for the property we call inertia.   I had some interesting discussion at last Fall's AAPT meeting which you can read about here.  There are also some nice links to a couple of YouTube Videos on the Higgs.  A great meeting where I learned everything I was teaching is wrong.

We also discussed how the Principle of Inertia allows us to perform the table cloth trick and the students made a model of the table cloth trick using a cup, a coin, and a card.  Using models to represent complex ideas is an important science practice and is finally receiving just due in the Next Generation Science Standards.

Some disgruntled seniors also attacked me with a sledge hammer.  Fortunately, I had a cinder block with lots of inertia in the way.

So a fun SHORT week with fun with Inertia with Slytherin and Ravenclaw.  Unfortunately, Hufflepuff will have to wait until Monday.  Rosh a Shona came very early this year, thus I have been out the rest of the week.  In fact, Rosh a Shona hasn't been this early since 1899, and the lunar calendar will not align this early again for another 76 years.   I studied a bit of talmudic astronomy back in college, and the alignment of the lunar calendar which only has 354 days is interesting, where a leap month occurs every few years.  Even then, it doesn't keep up and there is drift.  The drift is about 2 hours every 19 years, which add up to a day every 231 years.   This 19 year cycle is called the Metonic Cycle after Meton of Athens.  If you read the Wikipedia pages, be careful to discern the difference between a synodic month and a sidereal months.  Synodic is how long it takes for the phase of the moon to repeat itself, whereas sideral is how long it take for the moon to make a complete orbit about the Earth.  There is a difference because the Earth is spinning as the Moon orbits.

In our faculty meeting yesterday, we had a guest speaker from BU Library who talked about digital resources and how students do research.  The discussion of e-books came up a bit, and quite a few opinions in the room were voices that BUA students prefer traditional paper books to e-books which just don't cut it.  Given that my own e-book (on the EV3 LEGO Mindstorm Robots) is coming out in a couple of weeks, it raised my curiosity if my colleagues were clued in or way off base.  How do students prefer to read books now, digital or paper?  Alejandro is reading the Percy Jackson series right now, and I decided that I would read it with him so we could discuss the Greek myths.  (Tonight we  watched the 1963 version of Jason and the Argonauts, which was cool if you like that story.)    So I could read along with him, I have been reading the books on my laptop, and I must confess, I actually like it.   When I told my boys that my book would not be available in paper, they asked me how I could do a book signing.   Hmmm, how does one do a digital book signing?

My mentor sent me an interesting link to maps of the world on Twisted Sifter.  This entertained me tonight and gives a bit of insight.

Today I went caving in Polar Caves in Plymouth, NH with the family.  Polar Caves are granite caves formed glacially as boulders (one of which is about 100 feet long) were dropped over the edge of a cliff.  Nothing better for a young pair of boys.