Lee Trampleasure’s Blog

Egg 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…

I’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/

I presented this handout at the Northern California/Nevada American Association of Phyiscs Teachers November 8 meeting at Foothill College.

Science Friday, my favorite radio show when I’m not teaching on Fridays, had a great piece today on carbon sequestering on the ocean floor.

Click the “Play” arrow on the lower left side to start the video. It does a great job of using breakfast cereals to help explain the process.

I 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 produced. (If you buy one, I get 10% of your $30.)

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.

There’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, but if you have Stellarium (a great open-source planetarium program), you can add it to your ssystem.ini file by entering the following information:

[17P/Holmes]
name = 17P/Holmes
parent = Sun
radius = 1200
oblateness = 0.0
albedo = 1.0
lighting = true
sidereal_period = 2513.00981
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16×16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_Epoch = 2454221.5
orbit_MeanAnomaly = 359.49863
orbit_SemiMajorAxis = 3.6174053
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.4324195
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 24.25862
orbit_AscendingNode = 326.86739
orbit_Inclination = 19.11331

Thanks to the great posters at SourceForge for this information.

Once you enter it in your program, you can see exactly when and where Comet 17/P Holmes will be visible at your location.

I 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 functions are relevant to their everyday lives? In this volume, practical questions that confront every classroom teacher are addressed using the latest exciting research on cognition, teaching, and learning.

How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom builds on the discoveries detailed in the bestselling How People Learn. Now, these findings are presented in a way that teachers can use immediately, to revitalize their work in the classroom for even greater effectiveness.

Organized for utility, the book explores how the principles of learning can be applied in teaching history, science, and math topics at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school. Leading educators explain in detail how they developed successful curricula and teaching approaches, presenting strategies that serve as models for curriculum development and classroom instruction. Their recounting of personal teaching experiences lends strength and warmth to this volume.

The book explores the importance of balancing students knowledge of historical fact against their understanding of concepts, such as change and cause, and their skills in assessing historical accounts. It discusses how to build straightforward science experiments into true understanding of scientific principles. And it shows how to overcome the difficulties in teaching math to generate real insight and reasoning in math students. It also features illustrated suggestions for classroom activities.

How Students Learn offers a highly useful blend of principle and practice. It will be important not only to teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, and teacher educators, but also to parents and the larger community concerned about children s education.

I 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 hours a day, provide him with a Scan Gauge II, and you’re bound to come up with statistics on gas mileage. Scan Gauge will tell you any engine error codes, but in addition it provides real-time gas mileage values. Driving my 1999 Saturn SW1 with the air conditioning on uses 17.2% more gas. Driving at 65 MPH compared to 55 MPH uses 22.3% more gas. Of course, this is where the challenge arises: Today I’m trying to cover 518 miles. If I drive 55 instead of 65, it will take me 1:27 longer (9:25 vs 7:58). What do I care more about, future generations having gas or my time? (Is that a loaded question, or what?) I’m glad I installed cruise control on the car, because this sure makes it easier to drive 55. I’ll probably set it around 57 today.

Remember that the shape of the car determines its air resistance, which has a lot to do with the change in mileage at higher speeds. My wagon is fairly square in the back, which is not a very aerodynamic shape.

Today’s experiment: Driving with the windows up vs driving with the windows down.

One other thing I noticed about driving 55 vs 65 is how much faster 65 feels. 55 feels like plodding along, where 65 feels zoomy. Of course, the speed limit on the Interstate I’m now driving on is 75!! It’s no wonder 55 feels safer when you compare stopping average stopping distances: 50: 175 feet; 60: 240; 70: 315. The change from 50 to 60 MPH creates a 37% increase in stopping distance!

I got in another 400+ miles yesterday. Since today I’m going to try for 518, making it to Winnett, MT, I’ve got to get going quick.

Lee

The 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 have only been around in the last second”), and discussed the role of science, politics, and religion.

I was impressed by his presentation on the inaccuracy of framing the debate as “Chance or necessity” (of how humans came to be on earth). Rather, he suggests that chance is the method that God used to create us. “He” knew how the universe would end up when He created the Big Bang. Although I’m not quite sure whether Coyne believes that God knew how the world would end up, or just that something good would come of it. In his writings, I have gleamed that his perspective is that we humans cannot understand the workings of God and creation, and that what we perceive of as chance may be intentional on God’s part.

This is, of course, sort of a cop out. ‘Well, I can’t prove the existence of God, but I’m going to believe it anyway.’ But I think that’s what it’s all about in the end. Beliefs are just that. We have some circumstances that lead us to a belief. They may be:

• Religious upbringing
• A life-altering experience
• Extensive study
• A ‘feeling’ or sensation that something is right.

I was able to ask a question at the end that I think I wasn’t quite eloquent enough to make clear, but I asked him how can anyone believe in any one God/book in our multicultural world. His response was that if one cannot believe in God any more, one should not believe. I think he thought I was asking more for myself than as a general question for other “believers,” but I do agree with his answer.

I’ll probably write more on this later, but that’s it for now. If anyone has any questions or thoughts to add, feel free to leave a comment

Lee

Today was kind of a slow day. I let myself sleep in–till 8:00

I saw one plenary speaker who discussed his role in international physics education. I found it interesting at the time, but can’t remember many of the details now. The second plenary speaker was Janet Guthrie, the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500, speaking on Racing as Metaphor. She has a BS in Physics, and while she doesn’t use it much these days, she knows how to discuss the physics of racing. Her talk was interesting and humorous.

One thing the AAPT is aware of and trying to correct is the lack of women and “underrepresented minorities.” There is much focus on attracting a more diverse community to physics education, and several of the papers I heard presented today were on the subject of women and physics. One group addressed how the misperception of scientists as being solo geeks locked away in their labs has a tendency to discourage many young women who may, on average, be looking for more social interactions than their male counterparts. Good science is actually quite communal.

One thing about academics, they have WTMA (way too many acronyms). Every group studying something has to name their system something, then continually refer to is by its new acronym throughout their talk. Not only does this bug me (I think that they subconsciously think that by giving it a name it makes it more important), but when I reflect on English language learners hearing all these new “words” that have no meaning other than as an acronym, I cringe.

Tonight I attended the Science Education for the Public committee meeting because in the Physics and Society “Crackerbarrel” discussion (yeah, it’s like we’re standing around at the corner store talking over the cracker barrel) a few of us were drafted to develop a nuclear energy workshop for 2008. Luckily, the committee had other plans (that include nuclear energy but more as invited talks than a hand-on workshop), and we don’t have to do it until 2009.

It’s quite interesting to have a group of physics educators developing a program on nuclear energy. Some are working/researching in the field, and are very supportive of it. Others are adamantly against it. But as educators, we all seem to come together in trying to keep the discussion balanced: we’re here to help people understand the science behind nuclear energy, then let them make up their own minds. It’s kind of fun to not know from the first word out of someone’s mouth were they stand on the subject. You have to wait around, listen to them, and then maybe even talk to them over lunch before you find out where they stand.

Tomorrow I have to decide whether to go to the Mathematics in Physics presentations or the “Physics and Society Education” ones. I’ll probably jump between the two. After that it’s a talk Those Who Can Teach by a high school teacher from Montana who won the Excellence in Pre-College Physics Teaching award.

Then in the afternoon I get to see the speaker I have been waiting around for, George Coyne, give his talk “Dance of the Fertile Universe: Cosmic and Human Evolution.” Sounds like a great talk.

After that, it’s back to Fayetteville for dinner with Karen G (Virginia is just too far to make it, so I’m spending another night in the fine state of North Carolina),  then off to see my cousin Karen and her husband Steve in Virginia. I’ll get in a visit with my aunt Ginny as well.

Saturday is the start of the westbound leg of my trip. A speedy drive to Michigan to see the Miller clan (with a possible stop for dinner with cousin Dave in Toledo). Tuesday night I’ll be in the Northern Hotel in Winnett, Montana (my family lived in Winnett the summer between my 2nd and 3rd grade year while my dad experimented with being a Methodist minister in two small town churches).

Thursday night I should make it to Seattle to see cousin Bob and his fiancee, and a breakfast with my friend Quinn (neighbor when we lived on California Street, he will just be arriving in his new home on an island north of Seattle).

Sunday I’ll start back down the old familiar I-5, with stops in Eugene (Lou), Ashland (Moira), and Red Bluff (Smiths). Then, I should arrive back in my pad in Pleasant Hill on Monday night, August 13th. Two days later teacher duties start, with classes starting the following Wednesday. I’m sure glad I have a week without the kids after I get back. I can do meetings with little effort and planning, but teaching requires so much more.

Off to bed now, it’s late my time

Love,

Lee