January 12, 2009Wind Powered Art Vehicle/Kinetic SculptureHere’s a video of a great kinetic sculpture that walks along a beach powered by the wind. Categories General/Science Education Comment: 1
December 1, 2008Great physics cartoonEgg drop contest One of the classic physics projects is an egg drop contest. Students develop an apparatus to hold an egg that will be dropped from the second or third floor (depending on how high the teacher can get easily). This cartoon is a great twist on that, and maybe a reason to use only unfertilized eggs… Categories Physics/Science Education Comments: 0
November 10, 2008Tips for using the TI 83/84 calculator in a science classI’ve posted my student handout “Analyzing data using your TI-83 or TI-84 calculator” to the web. You can find it and more TI tools at trampleasure.net/science/TI-calculators/ [October 23, 2009: I have an updated version you can find here.] I presented this handout at the Northern California/Nevada American Association of Phyiscs Teachers November 8 meeting at Foothill College. Categories Modeling/Physics/Science Education Comments: 0
July 25, 2008Carbon sequestering in the seabed, nice video tooScience Friday, my favorite radio show when I’m not teaching on Fridays, had a great piece today on carbon sequestering on the ocean floor. What if you could take CO2, pump it down a deep hole in the sea floor and turn it into something harmless? New research suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. David Goldberg, Taro Takahashi and... Categories Environment/Science Education Comments: 0
May 19, 2008pi tieI made a pi tie at Zazzle.com. They are like CafePress.com: you can add text and images to many different types of products. Mr. Schroeder and I will be sporting them next March 14 (that’s pi day, 3/14). You can order them online, and I got mine in only two days. Helps to work 30 miles from where they are... Categories General/Science Education Comments: 0
February 25, 2008Physics day in the snow!There is a brief commercial message before the new clip (well, free is rarely free): Click here for the video A nice improvement over amusement park field trips. Too bad we don’t have snow in the Bay Area. Categories Physics/Science Education Comments: 0
October 29, 2007Comet 17/P Holmes starting to light up the skyThere’s a comet that’s starting to sparkle the night sky: Comet 17/P Holmes. It is said to look quite nice with binoculars or a small telescope, but is also visible with the naked eye. NASA has a great 2D model of the comet’s orbit. (You’ll need Java, but almost all computers these days have it installed.) I’ll post more soon,... Categories Physics/Science Education Comments: 0
October 29, 2007Book review: How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the ClassroomI haven’t read How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom yet, but it is available to read online, and a quick skim of it enticed me to come back soon for more. From the web site: How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you even begin to persuade high school students that mathematical... Categories Book recommendations/Science Education Comments: 0
August 8, 2007Into North DakotaI made it across the Mississippi today! Guess that means I’m in “the West.” I crossed the Big Muddy where it isn’t so big, nor so muddy, in Brainerd, MN. If memory serves me right, Brainerd is the city where Marge Gunderson is from in the movie Fargo. Well, put a physics teacher behind the wheel of a car for... Categories Science Education/Summer 2007 Comments: 0
August 1, 2007Wonderful talk by George CoyneThe capstone of my time here was a talk by George Coyne, SJ. Coyne talk was titled “Dance of the Fertile Universe: Cosmic and Human Evolution.”Coyne is the former Director of the Vatican Observatory (1978-2006), and has written extensively debunking the “Intelligent Design” theory. He gave a quick history of the universe (“if the universe is one year old, scientists... Categories Science Education/Summer 2007 Comment: 1
