Newton’s Laws of Motion

We had a lot of fun demonstrating the "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" in Physical Science. We did a lab called "Quite a Reaction" that involves cutting a thread that is holding a rubber band with a marble in its bend. It's all held together on a piece of cardboard with thumbtacks and the cardboard is sitting on 6 straws to allow movement of the cardboard. This document has the directions for the students and this one is the lab sheet they glued into their notebook.

The action and reaction happen so quickly that it's hard to see well, so we took some slow motion video of the experiment. Recording it this way made it so much easier to see.

The other activity we did with Newton's Laws of Motion was a Breakout EDU. This was the first Breakout that I did with this class. I had bought two Breakout boxes and this gave me access to the breakouts on their website, breakoutedu.com. There are also free breakouts available, even if you don't have a subscription.

There is a breakout on Newton's Laws of Motion that involves motion graphs that students have to interpret, a card sort of motion events that students have to classify as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd law, and some momentum problems to solve. As students complete the tasks, they discover combinations to multiple locks on one small and one large box. The kids loved it. Both groups were able to breakout before the end of the class. The boxes had candy and some prize cards that students work on earning throughout the year. 

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

Energy and Roller Coasters

I was so excited when I saw Sarah blog in MathEqualsLove about Marble Roller Coasters in her Physical Science class. I knew when we got to potential and kinetic energy we had to do this. Just yesterday we did this in class. The exclamations of the students helped me to know that this lab was a big hit.

The class was split into groups of two and each group was given 2 insulation tubes that were cut in half, so they had a total of 7.2 meters of roller coaster track. Each group was also given 1 marble, a roll of masking tape, and three pieces of duct tape (to tape the ends of the track together).

Before the lab, I did some searching online for idea of parameters to give to the students and what to ask them to do in their notebooks. Here is one document I found, but most of my ideas came from this lab.

Most of the pairs worked on this for a solid 60 minutes and a few groups would have been happy to have a little more time.

Here is the direction sheet that I provided for each group. And this is the lab sheet that they were given to put into their notebooks.

Creative Series and Parallel Circuits

Last year, knowing that I would be teaching Physical Science this year, I started collecting ideas on Pinterest for labs. One of the pins was for making circuits with aluminum foil and Christmas lights from Nitty Gritty Science. I loved the idea and had a couple of strings of old lights that weren't working reliably. I actually started to cut the lights up at the end of last year to be prepared.

I made a basic model of a series and parallel circuit to show my students and then told them to be creative. The kids certainly didn't disappoint! Most loved the process and asked if they could bring the supplies to finish up at home. They worked in class for 80 minutes, and several students had only finished the series circuit, but were still in process for the parallel circuit by the time class was over.

We began by drawing a schematic of their design. Once the design was approved, they got their supplies of a manila folder, 2 brads, a sheet of foil, scissors, several Christmas lights, a 9 volt battery, and tape. They needed reminders that tape is an insulator and to make sure the foil is always touching foil for the entire circuit.

Several parents actually commented about the popularity of this lab to me when they saw me later.

I put together directions for each table of students and also a lab sheet for them to glue into their notebooks.

Egg Drop Challenge

As we were wrapping up our unit on forces and interactions in Physical Science, I wanted the kids to have the opportunity to apply their knowledge and also have some practice with the engineering process. For our last class before the unit test, we had an egg drop challenge.

I did some research on line, but many of the challenges out there are for students to build an apparatus at home and bring it in for the competition. Since I only see my students for one 90 minute session a week, they are busy during the week with reading the chapter and doing other assignments. I wanted students to have the opportunity to test designs and make improvements as well as practice working as a team.  So, I pilfered ideas mainly from this document and put together what would be my student's in class building challenge.

Students had about 70 minutes to design and build their egg holder. Some were a little slow to start, but by the end they were all fully engaged. If I were to do this again, I'd try to figure out some way to limit the amount of glue from the glue gun used per team. I had about 7 sticks (for a full sized glue gun) and it was all used before some teams had a chance to use it even once. It was primarily one team that went hog wild with it.

In the end, of the seven teams, three of them successfully dropped their egg and had no damage to the egg. The other four were valiant attempts, all of which were exciting to watch.

Here are the directions that I gave students.  It also includes the list of materials that I provided each team. All of it fit in a gallon ziplock bag. Three of the teams asked if they could use the gallon bag, and I did allow them too--even though it wasn't on their list. For students' notebooks, I gave them this reflection sheet. I also made these score sheets. These scores did not effect their lab grade, but was used to decide some fun prizes. In the end, we did not measure the distance from the target since we had to drop them on the stairs and the egg holders were flying everywhere off the steps.

Penny Density in Physical Science

One of the labs we did this year in Physical Science when we were studying density was one called "Coin Operated" from our textbook, Holt Science & Technology: Physical Science. Lab groups are given a set of 10 carefully chosen pennies that they mass individually and are asked to divide into two groups. (Their masses give a big hint about how to divide them.) They also use the water displacement method to determine the volume of the pennies. Students find the density for each set of 5 pennies and then are asked to determine what element they are likely to be made of. In an ideal world, one set will be close to the density of copper and the other close to zinc. Then students are tasked with figuring out how they could divide the pennies without an electronic scale. Eventually, students realize that older pennies (pre-1982) are made of copper and new pennies (post-1982) are made of zinc.

Our first test included a lab practical section and I wanted students to find the density of a penny and use that information to determine if the penny was from before 1982 or after 1982.  Of course, how do you hide the date from the students?  Fortunately, one of the few souvenir items my husband and I  let our kids get when we go somewhere special are those squished pennies with the logo of whatever place we are at. One of my daughters helped me round up four of these squished pennies so I could have four test lab stations going at once. Believe it our not, it turned out that two of them are pre-1982 and two are post-1982. Since the test, I've found two more, both post-1982.

First Day of Physical Science (Part 2)

Today was actually the first day of Physical Science.  I teach this class at a homeschool consortium that started today, so it is certainly falls into the category of a non-traditional classroom.  I only see this class for one 90 minute period a week, and I design the class with all hands-on labs to complement whatever chapter/topic they are reading and studying at home.

After we finished with our team building activity with Legos and clue cards that I blogged about earlier here, we moved onto the Mini Metric Olympics. I used the direction cards from this post on Math = Love. The only thing that I had to do besides gathering materials was create an answer sheet that would fit into their notebooks.  I also wanted them just to find their percent error, so I only included a column for that, not error.

The kids loved the activity and I actually overheard one of the students say, "This class is fun," as her group was moving from one station to another. That's a win in my book!

Lots of measuring going on...

...and estimating too.

An Onboarding Video for Physical Science

In preparing for gamifying my Physical Science class, I've been reading blog posts, listening to the Well PlayED podcast, and participating in the #XPLAP twitter chat when I can (10PM is so late sometimes!) Several people who gamify make intro videos to help get students excited about the game. I've been working on the Apple Teacher certification and most recently finished the iMovie badge. It just made sense to give making this intro video a try with iMovie.

I enlisted the help of my younger two daughters to set the scene, make some characters, and try our hands at some stop-motion animation. (Much laughing ensued at some of our mistakes--and the girls begged me to leave them in.) After taking over 100 pictures we looked at the themed trailers in iMovie and decided their retro trailers was a perfect match. I briefly hopped over to Google Photos to make the animations since the assistant in Photos makes it so easy. Then we got to work choosing pictures for the trailer, and changing the titles on the pages to match the theme of my class. You may notice that I added a couple of quick shots of items and badges-just to pique their curiosity. I'm hoping this trailer will at least add some anticipation for the class.

First Day of School Plans for Physical Science (Part 1)

I cannot even tell you how tickled I was last year to see that Sarah Carter of Math = Love was teaching Physical Science. I knew I'd be teaching physical science this year, and would have resources available from her blog to use. As I figured, I am starting the year with two activities she blogged about.

I love having students work in collaborative groups. I wrote my master's thesis about it! One of my grad school classes actually had Elizabeth Cohen's Designing Groupwork as a text. I plan to use "Broken Circles" from this book a week or two after school starts. But more on that later. What I'm going to use to start training students in collaborative work is the exercise "Build It." from the book Get it Together: Math Problems For Groups Grades 4-12. Sarah blogged about it here. The directions and cards are available from Stanford University. I did rework the directions slightly to work with the materials I had (Legos) and to work with the titles I had for roles that students play in their group. Here's the direction sheet each group will get:

Build It

Everyone Gives Information

Supplies: (To be picked up by the materials manager)

1. Baggie with Build It clue cards (start with Built It #1 cards, only take one set at a time, come back for the others when you are finished with your current set, and return the set you are finished with)
2. A set of square Legos (2 each of red, yellow, orange, blue, purple, green)
3. A piece of graph paper

Objective: Your group's goal is to build structures described in the clue cards, following the rules below.

Rules:

1. The Materials Manager will open one envelope and pass all the clues out to members of the group.
2. Each of you, may look at your own clue(s) and tell your group what it says, but do not show the cards to anyone else.
3. Build it!
4. When the group is done, review your clues to make sure that you really are finished. (The Monitor should give final approval.)
5. The Recorder should sketch your solution on graph paper.
6. Return the cards to the front and try the next puzzle following the rules above.
7. When time is up, return all cards in their baggies, and all Legos to the front.

Discuss the following question:

How did your group know that you had solved the puzzles?

Adapted, with permission, from Get It Together, © 1989 The Regents of the University of California. Program for Complex Instruction — Stanford University.

I printed and laminated all of the build it direction cards and bagged up the appropriate Legos (thanks to my younger two daughters who have quite the Lego obsession). Last night I asked my mom (who is visiting) and my 15 year old daughter to be guinea pigs and try this out, since in general I don't like to do activities cold in class. I am ashamed to admit this, as someone who has taught Geometry, but we decided that edges were the lateral surfaces of the Legos and the faces were the top and bottom. I can assure you that Build It #1, #3, and #4 will not work with these incorrect definitions. Fortunately, my mathematician husband came in and asked some clarifying questions about edges and faces and light-bulbs lit up.  The builds went much better after that. I decided that I will give students these definitions in diagram form at the beginning so they can get to figuring out how to work together right away.

We did find one card that didn't work in the Build It Between set of directions.  There are two cards, one that says, "The green cube is between the orange cube and the yellow cube." and another says, "The orange cube is between the green cube and the yellow cube." I think the easiest fix is to leave one of those cards out. We put the row together by leaving out, "The green cube is between..."

In our attempt to understand the directions when we were confusing what an edge was, I googled Build It to see if I could find some pictures of solutions. Instead of solutions, I found another cooperative group building exercise that I think I'll use a couple of weeks into the school year.  The document is here. In this exercise students use clue cards to build a city block. 

This tower needed a view from the bottom to see all of the blocks.

Go, Go, Gadget...

I've moved onto another part of developing the game of Physical Science.  Another element of the game comes in the form of "items." Since we're going with an Inspector Gadget theme, I'm calling them "gadgets."

Students earn these gadgets several different ways.  I wanted to make finishing homework extra rewarding. If students earn their badge for successfully completing the work for every chapter in a unit, then they get a mini-spy glass gadget (which is a 2 x 3 inch card).  This allows them to bring an index card of information with them to the unit test.  If they do a superb job on an assignment from each chapter and therefore get a star on each badge in that unit, they get a mega-spy glass gadget. Then they may use their entire notebook for the test.

The rest of the gadgets will be given for soft skills I want to encourage in the class. I think it's so valuable to be able to work well in a group, to stay engaged through an entire task, and to do their best work. I'm sure there will be other things I want to encourage and will add them as I go.  At the end of the class, I plan to pick the group (called squads) that worked together best and each will get to pick a gadget card.  The group who scored the most points the week before will each get to draw a card.  I'll also pull them out when someone does an exceptional job with a task.

There are cards to help a group during review games, to help individually on a test, to allow them to break some rules of the game, and to get a little treat occasionally.  Many will be valuable to their group, and I'm aiming for some peer pressure from group members to make sure each of them are keeping up with the class.

Students will be allowed to trade cards at certain times and will hopefully encourage the social gamers.  There is also a card I give them all to start with.  If they ever don't complete their work, they have to hand that card in.  Without that card, they can't trade or use any of the other cards they have.

To hold earned cards, there will be a baseball card holder taped into the front cover of their composition notebook with clear mailing tape. Since it's a little bit too big for that area, the top will be folded over and fastened in place with Velcro.  I am a little nervous about the cards falling out of the top row.  My 7th grader suggested a little bit of washi tape over those three openings. I may let students decide how they'll secure the top row.

Here are the names of the gadgets, what the gadgets allow, and how they are earned.

Gadgets

Item	Power	How to Earn
Mini spy glass	Bring index card during test	Earn all badges for that unit by completing all normal case work with a passing grade
Mega spy glass	Use notebook during test	Earn stars on all badges for unit by doing exceptional work on normal or special cases for each chapter
PI badge	Allows trading, allows use of all other gadgets.	Given, lost if normal case load isn’t completed, returned when caught up
Steps retracer	May complete more than one special case for a chapter	These are given to the group who has earned the most points in a week, to a group who has demonstrated exceptional collaborative skills, or has done exceptional work in class on a project, or to a person finding an Easter egg.
Time machine	May complete a special case from a past unit
Sweet Stock	Pick from the candy supply
Loot lifter	Pick from small items
Doubler	Holder may take two prizes, or a large one if at level 2
Interrogation Minimizer	On multiple choice test questions, holder may ask teacher to eliminate 2 incorrect choices.
Executive Pardon	Allows holder to submit work 1 week late without penalty.
Spring Shoes	Allows user to skip another groups’ turn during a review game.
Secret Storage	Allows user to place more than one card of the same type in the same slot of the gadget holder.
Software Update	Allows user to trade a card with the teacher. (once at level 3, can ask for a specific card, under level 3 has to pick randomly)
Flash Bang	Allows user to double the value of a review question for their group.
Super Sonic Ears	Allows user to ask for a hint on a test question.

I used google drawings to make the cards.  Each student will have a baseball card holder in his/her notebook to store the cards earned. The cards are divided into two files.  Gadget Cards 1 and Gadget Cards 2 and there is also a template.

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