Two new activities for PhET's "Faraday's Electromagnetic Lab"

I've always liked the presentation of PhET's "Faraday's Electromagnetic Lab" sim, but could never figure out how best to leverage them in inquiry-based activities. And some might say that I have yet to overcome that challenge.

Nonetheless, I wrote two activities that—between them—allow for the exploration of the sim's capabilities. There's some good physics illustrated and animated in the sims.

Electricity and magnetism are difficult subjects for physics learners, so many hands-on lab activities are called for. No harm in adding a few virtual lab activities to the mix.

"Faraday's Electromagnetic Lab" sim.

"Faraday's Electromagnetic Lab I: Magnets and Electromagnets" activity and answer key.

"Faraday's Electromagnetic Lab II: Pickup Coil, Transformer, and Generator" activity and answer key.

These are "first-takes" and may benefit from further development at a later time.

Tonight on Global Physics Department

Me.

Global Physics Department > SITES I LIKE > Link to Global Physics Department Chat

"Why I am not a modeler"
6:30 pm PT - 7:30 pm MT - 8:30 pm CT - 9:30 pm ET

Invitations to AP Physics

As you can see from the post below, I'm not shy about marketing my Physics course.

While I do my best to blanket the school with my "Physics—you don't want to miss it" ads, I market our AP Physics course only to those enrolled in Physics.

My course is AP Physics B, and I teach it as a second year course. (Just like AP Biology is a second year course and AP Chemitry is a second year course and AP Physics B is designed to be a second year course.) So the only real market for my AP Physics pitch is my Physics students.

I also like to let my top Physics students know that they should consider enrolling in AP Physics. You'd be surprised how many top-performing Physics students hadn't even considered AP Physics.

For several years, I have prepared a list of top performers and then sent each one a personalized invitation to AP Physics. I do not give them the invitations in class. Rather, I ask the student aides in the school's main office to deliver them during my prep period.

That way, each invitee's accomplishment is made known to another teacher, and the invitation creates a stir in the non-physics classroom. Well-earned pride is allowed to beam, and I get nice comments from colleagues about what a nice gesture it is and what a great student the invitee is.

When I found out that AP Physics wouldn't run without at least 32 students last year, I put my invitation program on hiatus. But it went back into action on Thursday as we ramp up for 2012-13.

We have had AP Bio and AP Phyz at Rio since I came to the school in 1986. AP Chemistry was added in the 1990s. We will offer AP Environmental Science next year. So there is reason to wonder if there is enough of a market to sustain AP Physics. We shall see.

This year's AP Physics Invitation.

PHYSiCS—you don't want to miss it

The "Take Physics—Understand the Universe" ad campaign dates back to the mid-'90s.

At its inception, it increased Physics enrollment from 4 sections to 6 sections. A minor panic ensued: there were too many students for me to teach. I was offered the opportunity to teach a 6/5ths schedule: 6 periods of instruction and no prep period; close to 200 students and no prep period. The pay would be 120%, though. I turned it down in less than one second.

Some students (juniors and sophomores) had to be denied enrollment in Physics. I was asked to draw names out of a hat. Again, I declined. "But it's your fault! You did all that advertising." I didn't disagree. And I didn't draw the names. The next year we hired a second physics teacher.

That teacher recently retired, and Physics enrollment has declined. As it was for the first 12 years of my career, I'm the only physics teacher at Rio.

I decided it was time to refresh the ad campaign. New slogan, new fonts. But most of the ad content remains unchanged.

Ad 1: Expectations of Entering Freshmen

Ad 2 Series: Wonder (3 pages)

Ad 3 Series: Do These Things (2 pages)

Ad 4 Series: Lies! (2 pages)

Ad 5: SCiSYHP

As always, I print these to "Neon Paper." This paper has a fluorescent coating on one side. It's very bright. And it's hard to find. Of late, it's not to be found at any of the office supply big-box stores. Nor could I find it at specialty paper warehouse suppliers in Sacramento. Amazon saved the day:

Pacon Neon Bond Copy Paper, 24 lb, Letter, Five Assorted Colors, 100 Sheets

I also produce an ink-draining poster that incorporates Storm Thorgerson's Dark Side of the Moon design, printed at 17"x22". I updated this one, too. My Epson Stylus Pro 3880 is large ink tanks; I can watch the matte black ink level drop during a single print.

Dark Side of the Moon Physics Ad

I also expanded into Français and Español for posting in the school's French and Spanish classrooms.

Ad 2 Series: Français - Español
I translated my original text via Apple's translation widget, than allowed the school's language instructors correct for proper usage/syntax given the context. The only non-English language I ever studied was BASIC. I'm not proud of that, and even that was a long time ago.

DSotM: Français - Español

Egg Toss in the District of Columbia!

The AAPT's Summer Meeting was held at my alma mater in 2009. JT Miller, a Michigan high school physics teacher, and I kept showing up to the same sessions and had a few chances to share stories.

He's now enjoying the use of a high-speed digital camera in his new position at E.L. Haynes Charter School in Washington, DC.

His classes recently braved to cold to conduct their version of the Egg Toss competition. Looks like many eggs were sacrificed for the advancement of science!

Teachers and students had a great time with the activity. "It was epic!" enthused Mr. Miller as he shared the video record of this momentumous event. See for yourself:



High-speed clips of Rio students catching tossed eggs can be found here. And Egg Toss: TX was reported in a previous post.

FTL Neutrinos? Maybe not

Slow down, Einstein slayers. The old man may still stand tall.

It appears there may have been an error in the faster-than-light neutrino findings that set the media world spinning last September. This just in from AAAS' Science Magazine (Science Insider).

Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results

Hat tip: Shane Trimmer.

Scheduled to appear on Global Physics Department

Global Physics Department is a group of high school and college physics educators who meet weekly online to discuss physics, physics learning, and physics teaching. GPD uses Elluminate Live which allows for audio, video, white board, and chat communication.

The live event each week begins at 9:30pm (ET) / 6:30pm (PT) and runs for about an hour.

Moderator/instigator, Andy Rundquist of Hamline University, kindly invited me to present and I've been scheduled for Wednesday, March 21. The recent discussion of Modeling Instruction here at The Blog of Phyz apparently brought me to the attention of a Department member. So we'll talk about that.

Sessions are recorded, so you can entertain yourself running through their archives. I've done that and sat in on a live session. (Live sessions are more fun since they are interactive.) The presentation environment, Elluminate Live, does not suffer from lack of stimuli.

Mirror mirror

Since Apple is shutting down iDisk web hosting (homepage.mac.com) pages in a few months, I need to move phyz.org and all the other sites and pages I've created over the past 15 years or so.

I've moved my web baggage to Rage. The mirror site should present a pretty convincing image. Eventually, I'll have phyz.org pointing to the new space.

Compare for yourself:

CURRENT: http://homepage.mac.com/phyzman/phyz (Will not survive past 6/30/12.)

NEW: http://marge.ragesw.com/~phyzorg/phyz (Trial status; hoping it will become permanent new home.)

Let me know if you spot any problems!

Modeling workshops 2012 calendar

Jane Jackson recently announced the 2012 calendar for Modeling Instruction summer workshops.

Full details, instructions, and links here.

There's one in Northern California hosted by NCNAAPT's own web weaver, Lee Trampleasure and polished veteran, Don Yost.

Betrayed again!

An esteemed colleague, LaVerne Gonzales, offered me nuggets of wisdom while I was still very much a rookie. One of them was, "There are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data, and those who will." I don't assume that the wisdom originated with him, but he was the vessel through which it was passed to me.

He was speaking of the importance of backing up one's computer files. Still a novel idea in the mid- to late-'80s, when personal computing was in its adolescence. I once had a backup regimen involving over 100 floppy disks, and Saturday morning was the scheduled time. Automated backup systems, such as TimeMachine, have since taken the drudgery out of long backup sessions

As a bemusedly graying veteran of computers and teaching, I add a corollary.

There are two kinds of computer users: those who have been betrayed, and those who will be.

My first taste of betrayal was with Silicon Beach Software's SuperPaint. SuperPaint was the initial design software used to develop The Book of Phyz c. 1988. But it seemed to get slower and buggier with each new release. By 1992, I had to jump ship to Deneba's Canvas. Canvas was once a Mac-only application. In 1992, it was tighter and nimbler than SuperPaint.

Back in the bad-old (pre-iPhone) days, software would sometimes originate on the Mac platform, become popular, get ported to Windows, then cease to be developed for Mac. And so it was with Canvas. ACDSee bought Deneba and killed off Canvas for Mac.

They recently introduced a Mac OS product intended to compete with Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom. I was moved to let them know exactly why no Mac user would knowingly choose to do business with them. The product is alive, but I know of no one who uses it.

But I have tons of curriculum material in Canvas X format with no viable alternative software available. As of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), Canvas X is dead. The pain of that harsh reality lies in the near future.

Another betrayal came in the form of a test-generating program called measureUP. By the time I bought into it, it had become LXR•Test. By the time LXR decided that the once Mac-only product would fare better as a PC-only product, I had developed an extensive bank of original test items. There was a long, slow, tedious process converting my old LXR items to ExamView.

ExamView seemed to be all the rage just a few years ago, when we adopting textbooks. But now ExamView is lagging behind on development for Lion.

Indeed, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is a betrayal all its own. With it, a little internal code-gem known as Rosetta is dead. Rosetta allowed OS X software written in the early days of OS X to work on Intel-chipped Macs. By killing off Rosetta, Apple killed two of the programs central to my teaching: Canvas (also abandoned by ACDSee), and ExamView (Einstruction development status: undetermined).

And finally we have the betrayal which is the genesis of this post. Once upon a time, Apple embraced the growth of online activity. They sold a suite of online applications and services originally known as dotMac (.Mac) then renamed to MobileMe. I bought the product because its iDisk allowed me to host my website as if the directories and pages were mere folders and files on my desktop.

Years later, Apple's new toy is iCloud. In yet another of Apple's ham-fisted moves, everything MobileMe must die: MobileMe bad, iCloud good. So gone is iDisk and website hosting. Poof, as of June 30, 2012. Unlike with the end of the Mayan calendar, the end of this world is real.

I must now move my websites to a new home on the Internet. I own the domain name phyz.org through 2018 via Register.com. And I can make phyz.org point anywhere I like. But I need server space. For now, I'm giving Rage a try. (The name nicely reflects my mood.)

Webpages, PDFs, and other documents are slowly filing (!) into the new space. I keep all the website files on my computer, so uploading everything is a simple, though time-consuming matter.

As of June 30, 2012, all my pages whose URLs include "homepage.mac.com/" will go 404. If Rage pans out, the new URL detritus will be "marge.ragesw.com/~phyzorg/".

The thing to remember is that phyz.org and ptsos.org should always work. They'll redirect to new endpoints, but they should always get you there.

There's going to be much angst, confusion, wailing, and gnashing of teeth along the way. I hope it will be short-lived.

I haven't moved to Lion yet and will hold off on that as long as possible. I'll see if I can avoid use of iCloud, knowing that Apple is likely to wake up some morning and decide to shut it down. I have greater faith in DropBox at this point.

Then again, my track record for picking a long-term winner is not good. There simply aren't very many long-term winners in software to be had.