Design Challenges in Physical Science

Teaching Physical Science in a classroom setting was new for me this year. (And the reason for so few blog posts this year.) Since I was building this course from scratch, I decided to try to design it according to the NGSS. New York put out a draft of their modified NGSS that guided me through class planning. Science and Engineering Practices is one of the key components of the NGSS and by the second half of the year, I finally started using some labs that were open-ended design challenges.

I don't teach this class at the same school I teach AP Biology. This class is at a non-traditional Consortium, where I only see my students once a week for 90 minutes (and then they do the rest of the learning at home) and there is an age range of students from 6th-8th grade. This is the first year that I've taught a class with 6th graders. The two years before, I taught Advanced Life Science at this Consortium for 7th-9th graders. I figured that 6th-8th wouldn't be much different, but it was a completely different dynamic! This class did not work as independently as I was used to classes doing. But, when I gave them design challenges, they took them on with enthusiasm and hardly needed redirection. They did four challenges in the second semester. For most, they had a full 80 minutes to work on the design.

When we neared the end of our unit on forces and interactions, student groups completed the egg drop challenge, that I blogged about here. They each received a bag of the same items and had to choose a design for their egg holder. They were allowed to trade with other groups if both groups agreed to it and they had a scoring scale to also help them as they decided what and how much of it to use. They wanted the lowest score possible which was determined by mass of apparatus, number of seconds it took to load the apparatus, the number of items in the apparatus. In the end, three out of seven of the groups dropped their eggs without breaking them.

When we started the unit on energy, students built a Rube Goldberg machine to complete a chosen task, utilizing the maximum number of simple machines. In this challenge students tried to maximize their points.  I brought in a collection of dominoes (including a standard set and two wooden sets of large dominoes), two sets of Legos from the Crazy Action Contraptions book plus several more pieces from my kids' Legos, yarn, marbles, cardboard boxes, toilet paper and paper towel tubes, and a roll of masking tape.

The next week, we moved onto building marble roller coasters (that I blogged about here) with lengths of pipe insulation cut in half. They had some parameters to follow--number of loops, turns, and hills. We also used their finished roller coasters to practice finding the average speed of the marble in the coaster.

We finished off the unit with a heat challenge. Students were given their choice of several items and tasked with designing an insulating box for a paper cup that would hold the heat of water as well as or better than a Styrofoam cup. I originally saw this idea in the Carolina Biological catalog. In fact they have several kits to use as design challenges in physical science--they're a great resource. I did some googling and used several sources to put together this challenge. (I would have been tempted to just buy the Carolina kit, but it was for a much larger class than I had.)

I'll include links to each of the challenge directions that I gave each group, the lab sheets that I gave them to complete an glue into their notebooks, and the scoring sheets I gave out for the ones that they were competing for the highest or lowest score to win some sort of prize.

Forces and Motion Unit:

Egg Drop Challenge Group Directions

Egg Drop Challenge Lab Sheet

Egg Drop Challenge Score Sheets

Energy Unit:

Rube Goldberg Machine Group Directions

Rube Goldberg Machine Lab Sheet

Rube Goldberg Machine Score Sheets


Marble Roller Coaster Group Directions

Marble Roller Coaster Lab Sheet


Keep The Heat Group Directions

Keep The Heat Lab Sheet

Keep The Heat Score Sheets

Salting the Oats

This coming school year, I am teaching Physical Science in addition to AP Biology.  This class is not at LCS, but at a local homeschool consortium. Last year, I taught Living Environment there and had one of my least favorite classes ever.  I had taught the same class the year before and had a good mix of motivated/unmotivated students.  This past year though, the balance was off, with a much stronger unmotivated portion.  I'm not talking about struggling students either, but capable kids who didn't seem concerned about their grade.  I know it's not about the grades, but the grades were reflecting a lack of learning.  It wasn't unusual to have more than half the class not turn in an assignment at all. (Yes, I kept in touch with parents and yes, I worked on tweaking the class as we went to try to pull them in.) I kept thinking, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." But then my mom's voice chimed in with, "But you can salt its oats!"

As I was thinking about this coming year, I focused on "salting the oats." I had read, Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess and then I read Explore Like a Pirate by Michael Matera, and decided that I was going to gamify Physical Science.

I used the NGSS from NY State (p. 28-35 of the document) to divide our book into units. At first I was going to make a badge that students would earn for each NGSS Middle School Physical Science learning objective that they mastered. With a couple of chapters not having LO's attached to them, but only core ideas, I decided it would be easier for me to keep track of and award badges by chapter.

Now, I feel like I need to make it clear that gamifying a class is not about badges.  It's just one element of the game and it happens to be the first game element I have physically worked on.  The theme is going to be "detective", Inspector Gadget style.  I had been thinking about basing it on the show CSI, but it seemed kind of gory for middle school, then I toyed with Nancy Drew.  I read one of the books, which did give me an idea of a game element to add, but I decided that I really don't like Nancy Drew! A couple of weeks later, our family watched the Inspector Gadget movie for movie night and a theme was born.

Just today, I finished designing the badges, one for each chapter.  The students will have a notebook with a divider for each unit.  The divider for the unit has spaces for a badge for each chapter. I decided to make the badges 1 1/4 inches, since from my scrap-booking days I had a circle punch that size.  I'll print them on card stock to make them sturdier and then send them through our Xyron sticker maker so students can stick them right in without having to deal with glue or tape. Students will earn the badge by successfully completing their Normal Case Load for that chapter.  Getting the gold star takes more than that, but more on that later...

I think my next project will be solidifying the Normal Case Load (regular weekly homework) and Special Cases. The special cases will give students a choice of projects to complete in each chapter to help them master the learning objectives--with several choices, they can pick the assignment that they feel will work best for them. Then I'll move onto item cards, that we will call "gadgets" that students can earn for working on soft skills that I think are important.

Here are the links to the badges and the unit dividers:

Badges

Unit 1 Divider

Unit 2 Divider

Unit 3 Divider

Unit 4 Divider

Unit 5 Divider