Notes and Links from the December 4th Meeting

We had a great turnout at our meeting in Grosse Pointe. Thanks to Scott for hosting us in his classroom. Scott Brunner is our President this year and this was our first meeting with Gary Abud as our Vice President.

As usual we started with introductions and then Beth Kubitskey gave a presentation on the Next Generation Science Standards. She discussed a bit about what we could expect to see and how this might change science education k-12. The new draft of the standards should come out in January for public comment. You really should try to check them out and make comments. Laura Ritter, has been involved in working on the standards at the state level, said they really do listen to comments and several changes have happened because of them. We will let you now when they become available.

Next up was Jim Gell. Jim showed one of his favorite demos. You need a large clearish balloon. You put the quarter in the balloon and inflate. The you try to get the quarter spinning. Once it starts you just hold the balloon and watch the quarter go and go. Then just wait for the questions from the kids. Jim also highly recommended looking for a video by Tony Wagner on "The Finnish Phenomenon."

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Gary Abud shared many ideas. He proposed that we should change out meetings slightly. We always have time for demos and labs, but usually save technology for special meetings. Technology is becoming a part of so many good lessons we should just include it with the demos and lab ideas at every meeting. Gary also went on to share how he uses blogs and twitter to learn from other great educators on the net. Gary also shared a cool Augmented Reality app for iOS and Android called Aurasma. You point the camera of your phone at a picture and then wait for cool stuff to happen on the phone's screen, as if the phone can see things that aren't visible to the naked eye. Cool stuff!

Stephanie Spencer followed this up with a similar technology. Stephanie puts QR codes on worksheets for her students. When her students finish a problem then can instantly check their answers to see if they were right or if they need to try it again. You could also just have this give hints for how to solve the problems.

Don Pata was up next. I recorded a part of his presentation and uploaded it to YouTube. Hopefully he doesn't mind.

He went on to show how he has his students use Excel to calculate the lengths of the different pendulums. If students can figure out how to set up a spreadsheet to do all of the calculations then there's a much better chance they really understand the relationship.

Scott Brunner was next up showing how you could use a LabPro with a force sensor and motion detector to determine Hooke's Law. You suspend a spring holding a weight from the force sensor above the motion detector. It helps to tape a 3x5 card to the weight to make it a better target for the motion sensor. You then start the weight bouncing up and down. The graphs for force and position are 180 degrees out of phase, pretty cool. The you create a new graph of Force vs. distance and then watch Hooke's law be traced out on the screen over and over again.

I (Steve Dickie) rounded out the meeting by sharing Steam for Schools. You can get free versions of Portal 2 and the Universe Sandbox for your school. Then all you need to do is convince your tech people to let you install them.