never mind the optics

I wrote a post last term about my S2 class asking to base their lessons for the remainder of the year around the science of space.  Since returning from the Easter break, I’ve been working on incorporating numeracy and problem solving into these classes.

The first time they returned to my class, there were funny looks in my direction.  I rearranged the desks to create working groups and pointed towards the equipment they would use; very large measuring cylinders, some tubing and stopwatches.

The scenario I used was

You are an astronaut joining a 10-day mission on the space shuttle.  NASA needs to know how much air you will need during the trip.

There was confusion.  The responses included

• NASA know how much air to pack
• they give astronauts a personal oxygen cylinder
• that’s impossible
• how do you measure gas?

In other words: “Houston, we have a problem.”

If the lesson was going to go anywhere, I would need to give some hints.  I started by asking where we had obtained oxygen for earlier experiments. Some pupils remembered heating potassium permanganate, probably because of the near-explosive results we had achieved that day.  I had to remind them of the time we collected oxygen gas under water from a cylinder.  The measuring cylinders were really just large gas jars and so we could exhale into them through a tube.

We aimed for at least one person per group to measure the volume of air they could exhale in one breath.  Some pupils used stopwatches to count the number of breaths per minute and I could see that they were starting to identify a strategy to answer the challenge.  More importantly, they began to explain their understanding of the problem to the others in their group and, within minutes, I had someone from each group ask for a calculator.

By the end of the lesson, and it did take around 45 minutes, each member of the class has calculated an answer and compared it with someone else. We discussed their answers and I explained that we use problem-soving methods like this in the real world.  Someone said it was like a mobile phone contract, I probably showed my age when I compared it to working out an electricity or gas bill.

I wasn’t going to post about this lesson.  That changed when I watched Dan Meyer’s TEDxNYED session.

Dan’s analysis of our current approach to problem solving is spot on -- I often remark to senior pupils that the question setter is leading them by the hand through a problem.  In this lesson, I avoided asking

How much air do you breath in

(i) one minute

(ii) an hour

(iii) a day?

and, in doing so, the class took ownership, rationalised and shared what they were doing.

Let’s make over the problem solving we do in science as well as maths.

Tags: numeracy, problem solving

I was interviewed by David Noble last month.  David is currently researching his doctoral thesis by interviewing educators to determine how they use the social web to support learning, teaching and professional development.  You can read more about his work and the participants on the Edonis Ning site.

I was quite nervous because our telephone conversation was broadcast live online using iPadio and I knew some people were listening.  If you missed it, David has published the audio here or you can download it below.

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Tags: edonis, professional development, social web

I’ve been working with a small group of physics teachers enlisted by LTS to help shape the resources required to support the new Higher Physics qualification being developed by SQA.  So far we’ve been discussing and prioritising the CPD issues raised at the SQA meetings held around the country in December.

There is a lot to think about as the proposed new content will be unfamiliar to many teachers.  I for one have a very limited understanding of astrophysics and just enough knowledge of particle physics to get me through the small section in the current advanced higher course.  This means we need to think about resources for teachers as well as pupils.

One thought is that we may go for a solution that mirrors the new National Qualifications site for History, with multimedia resources alongside more conventional text-based support.

Another interesting aspect is the introduction of a practical half-unit called Researching Physics.  This will take the form of an investigation around a theme, with an interesting example that looks at ultra-violet radiation and skin cancer.  (The science of earthquakes has been suggested as an alternative topic.)

The meetings were held at SSERC and this has allowed us to try out ideas for the researching physics topic and consider new approaches to content with which we are already familiar.  SSERC’s Gregor Steele did a great job in developing activities to challenging our thinking.  Here are some photos I took during the practical sessions.

Investigating the effectiveness of different suncream “factors” at blocking uv.
	Measuring the irradiance of a uv light source.
Demonstrating particle physics experiments using a Teltron tube
	Using a coil and magnet as a vibration sensor.
Recording the induced voltage using Audacity

We also looked at the ways in which changing mass might affect the motion of a toy  (lots of things going on here – weight, centre of mass, friction and simple harmonic motion all playing a role in determining the motion of the wooden woodpecker)

and learned how to use tracker.jar to analyse projectile motion.

So far, it looks like my role is likely to involve the creation of digital resources for the new higher.  It could be a busy summer…

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Tags: LTS, SQA, SSERC

I thought I had done well to get some of my AH Physics class to submit a draft of their investigation report to me by 3.30 on the last day of term.  I had no idea how much I would regret not paying attention to the type of files that were dragged and dropped from usb memory sticks to my macbook desktop.

When I got home, I noticed that all of the files were saved at Word 2007 files, with the .docx file extension.  That didn’t bother me as Office 2007 has been deployed on an increasing number of machines across the school and Word for Mac 2008 on my macbook has always opened .docx files in the past.

However, none of those files contained items inserted using the new Word 2007 equation editor.  When I went to open the first file, I was confronted by a warning message

I clicked ok and when the document opened, I was presented with a strange selection of characters where the maths should have been,

clearly not what was intended.  I was a bit miffed as I thought that 2008 for Mac would be able to view, if not edit, equations produced in Word 2007.

Undeterred, I tried to open the pupil’s work in Apple’s Pages

which simply refused to show anything.  So I tried OpenOffice instead.  Even after upgrading to the latest version of OO.o, all I could see was

so I was kind of stuck!

Then I went looking for an online solution and found that Zamzar could change .docx files into the .doc format.  This worked like a charm and I was able to open the .doc files and view the equations, which had been inserted into the document as images.

While the mix of software deployed across my school has clearly had some bearing on the situation, I’m still amazed at the fact that Microsoft have broken the compatibility of their Word application across the PC and Apple platforms.  If it wasn’t for Zamzar, we would have had some unhappy S6 pupils in class at the start of next term.

I’m a big fan of howstuffworks.com but there are times you just need to get your hands dirty and find out for yourself.  My S3 class spent the last physics lesson of the term taking apart a portable colour tv to see what was inside the box.  Of course, they have a fair idea as they have studied the theory of how an image is produced in the screen but I wanted them to see the real thing.  Luckily, a friend was getting rid of a broken tv set and I “rescued” it from the bin men.

We ran two video cameras during the “dissection”.  One was a Flip Mino HD and the other was an aGent webcam I bought about two years ago to replace a broken firewire webcam.  I’ve not used the aGent much this past year as my macbook has a built-in iSight camera but it is a nice piece of kit, with a variety of tripods and clips to position it for classroom filming.  I’ve used the aGent for classroom filming before, the same class took a hoover apart but this was the first time I had made much use of the Flip Mino HD.

Three pupils were involved in the dissection while their classmates watched the footage relayed to my projector by the aGent camera. We had a good 30 minutes of unscrewing,wire cutting, removing and identifying various components. Now I have the difficult job, taking footage from the two cameras and producing a short film about the TV during the Easter holiday.

Update:

The video is finished.  Watch it here.

A colleague came to ask for some smartboard help last week.  She wanted to do an activity with a class that involved sampling with a quadrat.

It’s hardly the time of year to take 20 kids outside to our muddy football pitch to throw wooden frames around, so she was looking for a way of simulating the process on her interactive whiteboard.

She had been trying to create a table and move it around a Notebook page but the empty cells of the table were preventing her from seeing what lay in each section of her quadrat grid.  I suggested that she could create the grid using a series of horizontal and vertical lines, grouping them together as a single item.  She called in later that day to say it had worked and several pupils had used her virtual quadrat during the lesson.

My colleague shared the notebook file with me and I have attached it in a zip file, just click on the download link below to save a copy.  I wonder if this could be used to introduce the idea of sampling in a virtual environment like Endless Ocean or African Safari?

 Other Media: Download

Tags: notebook, smartboard

Ok, so this isn’t really a post about the physics of St. Patrick’s day but the shape of the green Maltese cross we saw in this Teltron tube today provided my S3 class with a timely reminder that it was nearly Paddy’s day.

Tags: fun

It’s that time of year when people start wondering what to do with S2.  I’ve mentioned this issue here and here in earlier posts.  Last year I looked at a space-related CfE outcome with S2.  I was going to trial a renewable energy topic with this class until one of them told me last week that there was a brilliant series about the solar system starting on BBC2 that weekend and I should watch it.

He was talking about Professor Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System and I had already set my BT Vision box to record the series.  However, the enthusiasm of others in the class to find out more about space, with questions such as “what is the sun?” and “is it true the world will blow up in 2012 and we’re all going to die?” suggested that there was value in trying to follow Prof Cox‘s journey through the solar system.

We’ve got 3 periods a week and some boys have asked if the lesson on Monday could be a repeat of the Sunday evening programme on BBC iPlayer. Here’s the trailer for the series.  Perhaps it will explain why the kids are so interested.

It looks exciting, the presenter is young and beard-free -- he was even in a band once.

We’ve toured the solar system using Celestia and, this morning, we started to look at the stars.  My starter question went something like “What’s the brightest star in the sky?” and they told me it was the sun.  Maybe someone tried that trick before, they didn’t say.

The sun apart, we normally consider Sirius to be the brightest star in the night sky.  So how do you find Sirius?  There is a great free programme called Stellarium that will display the night sky.  It turned my smartboard into a planetarium for the duration of the lesson.  Most pupils were able to point towards Orion and I showed them how a line towards the ground from Orion’s belt would lead to Sirius.  Here’s a screenshot of Stellarium.

The funny thing about stars is that they are back to front.  Go into the bathroom and look at your taps.  The red one is for hot water and the blue one is for cold.   But in astronomy the blue stars burn hotter than red ones. Notice in the screenshot above that the bottom right star, Rigel, is shown in a blueish hue while the top left star, Betelgeuse has a red tinge.  Rigel is an incredibly hot and bright star, while Betelgeuse is a lot cooler.

The homework for next week is to go outside and find these three stars in the night sky.

Tags: astronomy

On Saturday, I had the privilege to share a share a platform with Nick Hood at the Scottish Science Education Conference at the Dunblane Hydro.  Our session went by the name “Using New Media in Science Education – Not Just for Twits”.  The aim was to share some of the online practice taking place both inside and outside the country’s science classrooms.

We spoke about blogging and walked the participants through the process of setting up a free blog.  Nick explained RSS and demonstrated why every teacher should use a RSS reader.  We also covered podcasting and use of a wiki.  For anyone interested in the links we used on the day, find a summary on my wiki.

During the session, we mentioned the lack of blogging Chemistry teachers. Word has reached us that Dr. Taylor has met our challenge head-on and started his own blog.  Great job, Dr. T.!

We ran into some problems today during a piece of practical work.  The aim was to use our new energy meters to verify the equation

Unfortunately, the values on the screen were changing too quickly for us to see them clearly.

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Luckily, someone suggested using the camera on their phone to take a photo of the screen.  It worked brilliantly.

Very quickly, everyone was able to record their own set of results on a phone and we quickly established that our equation worked.  Much better than guessing numbers on a flickering screen.