Lee Trampleasure's Blog – Page 9 – Science education and more…

December 7, 2010

“You can’t put something on the final we haven’t seen!!!”

Today as a finals review “warm up” (although it ended up taking the whole period) I presented the students with four beakers of water: One with ice, one at room temp, one on a hot plate “low” (about 37C) and one boiling. I used Logger Pro to show the four temperatures on a projector screen (a sensor in each beaker)....

Modeling/Physics/Science Education Comments: 2

November 22, 2010

Berkeley Student Food Collective now open

A new food cooperative opened on November 15 in Berkeley. The Berkeley Student Food Collective is open to anyone, student or not. Both members and non-members can shop, members receive a discount in exchange for work hours. I’ve shopped there a couple times, and the store is quite well stocked. It’s just a small storefront, so don’t expect to get...

Berkeley politics/Dining and eating Comment: 1

October 17, 2010

Spreadsheet for calculating slopes at points on quadratic functions

On the Physics Modeling email list there has been a discussion of finding tangents to a parabolic curve using an Excel spreadsheet. The primary way we use this is when students graph position vs time of a ball rolling down a ramp. Students discover that the relationship can be modeled as a parabolic equation, x = at2+bt+c. If they can...

Modeling/Physics/Science Education Comments: 0

October 14, 2010

Drive 55 MPH on Spare the Air days

With the batch of Spare the Air days in the San Francisco Bay Area in the last few weeks, I came up with an idea that would probably save a lot more gas than trying to get people to carpool and take transit (not that I’m suggesting we stop this, but I’m not sure how many people really switch on...

Environment Comment: 1

August 10, 2010

End of the year teacher evaluation for my physics students to complete

At the end of each school year, I have my students complete an evaluation of the course. My goal is for them to reflect (1) me, (2) the class, and (3) themselves. I find the evaluations extremely valuable. Scary at times, but valuable. This last year wasn’t one of my best, and the evaluations showed that to me. But I...

Physics/Science Education Comments: 3

July 15, 2010

Using a TI-83 or TI-84 graphing calculator in high school physics classes

This summer I’m leading a workshop at the American Association of Physics Teachers meeting entitled “Using graphing calculators in the classroom.” Featured in the workshop is my handout titled “Analyzing data using your TI-83 or TI-84 calculator.” You can download a PDF version of the worksheet here. The handout has calculator screenshots and uses TI fonts to show the exact...

Modeling/Physics/Science Education Comments: 4

July 15, 2010

AAPT meeting in Portland and my bike trip home

I’m leaving today for the American Association of Physics Teachers summer meeting in Portland, Oregon. I’ll be presenting a workshop at the meeting (see next post), then riding my bicycle to Eugene then down the coast back to Berkeley. You can follow my cycling exploits here: www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=RrzKj&doc_id=7183&v=V

2010/Bicycles Comment: 1

July 13, 2010

Welcome…

…to my blog. I write about science education, radical/liberal politics, accessible web design, web support for small “brick and mortar” businesses, and a little about my life. Since I write about such a broad spectrum of topics, you may want to click the category link (on the right) of the topic you are most interested in.

General

June 29, 2010

New Grade Machine support email group

Grade Machine’s creator, Misty City, closed and sold the program to Pearson, who then stopped work on and support for the program. So it’s up to the users of Grade Machine to help each other out. A new Google group is designed for peer-to-peer support for this wonderful grading program. You can find and join the group here: http://groups.google.com/group/grade-machine. If...

Grading software Comments: 2

June 9, 2010

Error analysis in volume measurements

I use the attached worksheet to walk my high school physics students through the process of determining the percent error in a calculated measurement. After these calculations, students then determine the range of their final results (± x cm3). Finally, they look at the range and discover that use of the “sig figs” rules gives them about the same value...

Physics/Science Education Comments: 0