Rio Phyz 2014: Class Portraits

Some with flash; some without. Some with teacher; some without. Some straight; some goofball. The whole set can be accessed via this Flickr Set:

2014 05 Rio Phyz Class Portraits

UPDATE: As per usual, Flickr sent the original album into the æther somehow. I re-uploaded the whole thing. I can't imagine relying on Flickr as a backup of any sort. Photo links often degrade faster than a fine pastry, and albums once loaded can easily disappear for no apparent reason.

ExploratoRio 2014 - The Video

Directed and produced by student videographer, Grant Webster. Laugh, cry, relive the memories!

ExploratoRio 2014

Outdoor activities for oddball days

A request was made (via our PTSOS discussion group) for outdoor activities that might be fun during weird days that seem to crop up at the end of the school year.

The ever-resourceful Los Gatos physics teacher and PTSOS leader, Dan Burns, suggested the following.

I like stomp rockets. Measure the distance to the launch, the angle it makes at apogee to the horizontal, calculate height. Measure time in air, calculate height and initial velocity.

Make pinhole cameras and use them to determine the diameter of the Sun.

Get in a line and spin in a circle. Each student calculates their angular and linear velocity.

Bang a drum twice per sec, students walk away until they hear the sound at the same time the drum is hit. Measure that distance, divide by 0.5 to get the speed of sound.

Make water balloon launchers out of surgical tubing. Calculate the force constant, the elastic potential stored, predict initial velocity and time in air if launched vertically. Then predict max range.

Have students push a car on a flat surface using bathroom scales. Drop beanbags at regular time intervals. Measure acceleration of car using the force applied and mass, compare to acceleration derived from pattern of beanbag separation.

Perform Herschel's experiment that detected IR radiation using glass prisms and thermometers.

Jump rope generator, rotate loop of wire like a big jumprope that is hooked to a galvanometer. See it generate current using earth's magnetic field. See Conceptual Physics Manual.

NGSS is a Renaissance, not an Upheaval for Physics Teachers

Your use of the word upheaval is overly sensational. According to Webster's, upheaval means: "a major change or period of change that causes a lot of conflict, confusion, anger, etc.". This characterization would only apply to AP Physics B teachers, a small subset of high school physics teachers (and now a null set!). As for NGSS, I would use something like "freedom", "autonomy", or even "Renaissance". Unlike previous top-down efforts to shackle professionals to a checklist of factoids, this set of standards is more about the process of teaching students how to think and use information to understand the world they live in. There is a large degree of freedom given to teachers to determine how they want to approach achieving the NGSS. NGSS is very similar to the approach outlined in decades-old documents like the Project 2061 "Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy" and the 1991 California Science Framework. It is the pendulum swinging back to a better time in physics teaching. If you rely on your professional judgement as to what constitutes good physics teaching practices, you will not have to worry very much about adapting to NGSS.

Even if you are a teacher that is experiencing "a lot of conflict, confusion, anger, etc." regarding NGSS, I say relax and enjoy the next 2 school years without worrying about preparing your students for state-mandated tests. The earliest these could return would be the 2015/16 school year and the people I work with that are more involved in this process expect them later than that. This is from the FAQ page on NGSS for California:

"When will there be new assessments for the NGSS?
The earliest new science assessments might be available is the 2014–2015 school year. However, due to the short timeline, new science assessments will most likely not be available until the following school year.

Will Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) have science assessments for NGSS?
At this time, new science assessments will likely be developed much like the assessments of SBAC . However, it is still too early to know exactly how and when new science assessments will be administered.

In SSPI Torlakson’s report Recommendations for Transitioning California to a Future Assessment System, Recommendation 4 encourages the development of new state science assessments consistent with the newly adopted NGSS for California, that include item types consistent with the SBAC assessments (e.g., short and extended constructed-response items and performance tasks)."

The full list or FAQs can be found here:

http://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ca/sc/ngssfaq.asp

I suggest they dig up the old Golden State Exams for Physics and complete this retro cycle!

Dan Burns
Los Gatos High School

Capturing ideas rather than moments

If Escher used Photoshop…

Hewitt Fest 2014 at Rio Americano

Conceptual Physics author, Paul Hewitt, was in Sacramento for a day so he could attend Pasco's 50th anniversary. (I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the event, which was great fun in celebration of an excellent company with solid corporate values.)

Hewitt, along with his delightful wife Lillian and ever-clever Evan Jones, was kind enough to drop in on my Physics classes today. He regaled the students with tales of the inverse square law, sunballs, college matriculation, and his path to physics.

After the lessons, the lunch time bell rang and my room became Groupie Shot City (or Selfie Central). My post to Facebook was, "An 82 year old textbook author visited my school today. The students mobbed him like he was a rock star."

Here are some images to prove it.

2014 05 Hewitt Fest at Rio Americano

Some readers might recall that Hewitt paid Rio Americano a visit on the last day of school, June, 2011.

NGSS? AP1? AP2? What physics is covered where?

Here's my first blush attempt to sort out the scope of each flavor of non-calculus high school physics.

One thing I will say about the new AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2 is that they are intentionally, deliberately de-emphasizing the notion of content. They've never wanted to really spell out, in detail, the specific topics covered in each course. The College Board is keen to talk for days about the emphasis on inquiry and big ideas. They seem keen to relegate the physics content specifics to the canvas on which inquiry and big ideas are painted.

The old AP Physics B course description detailed the content coverage down to percentages. The new AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2 course descriptions mention physics content as if specific topics were but an afterthought. Check out the two-page executive summaries of AP1 and AP2 and see hope much ink is devoted to identifying physics content.

In any case, I did a "back of the envelope" style stream-of-conciousness layout of physics content topics and where—if at all—they are covered in the upcoming NGSS, AP1, AP2 scheme. The green, checked topics are, in my estimation, explicitly called for. The yellow, slashed topics are implied (or, more correctly, inferred by me).

Others may object to my topic list. Ro each, his/her own. Others may read the NGSS, AP Physics 1, and AP Physics 2 descriptions differently. I may read them differently by this time, next year.

Keynote conversion: Phase 1 complete

As mentioned previously, I'm converting the curriculum material I've written over the years from Canvas documents to Keynote documents.

Just before 10pm last night, I completed Phase 1 of this project. All my Physics 1 documents are now converted. This was an important milestone to exactly me. The Phyz Springboard: Understanding Rainbows was the last to be rebuilt. All tolled, over 200 documents were reconstructed. Most were two pages, a few were only one, but many were three or more pages. I don't know exactly how many pages had to be rebuilt, and it's probably better that way.

Work has already begun on Phase 2: AP Physics B (now AP Physics 1 and 2). But there are miles to go before I sleep on that. Completing Phase 1 took the better part of two years. If all goes well, Phase 2 will be done sometime in 2016. I'll need my aging MacBook Pro (2008, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard) to hold up through then, since my newer MacBook Pro (2012, Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) does not have Rosetta and so cannot open Canvas X.

The seaworthiness of my lifeboat, Apple's Keynote, has been cast into doubt by Apple's dramatic botching of Keynote 6. It appears that Apple really doesn't want to author software anymore. As a matter of pragmatism, I'll need for Apple to fix Keynote (unlikely), or at least allow for the continued operation of Keynote 5 for another 10 years (not likely). Both of those are tall orders.

Here's where the Canvas X to Keynote 5 stand now. (Green means a section is complete, orange means a section is down to a fewer than 4, yellow is fewer than 2.) (Also in the interim, California's 9-12 Physics CST has been discontinued and NGSS is being adopted. To wit, the unit on heat and thermo is no longer part of our first-year physics class.)

The punchline? After killing Canvas for Macintosh in 2007, ACD claims they are developing Canvas for Macintosh in 2014. At this point, I don't trust them, and I wouldn't put it past them to develop Canvas 15 for Mac as a app that either cannot open Canvas X documents or will scramble such documents upon opening them.

ExploratoRio 2014 Photo Album 1 - The DB Set

Here are a few shots that I got while hosting ExploratoRio 2014 on April 9. More photos should be coming soon. This is but a start.

2014 04 ExploratoRio

AP Physics at Rio update

We didn't have AP Physics B this past year. Enrollment sign-ups were insufficient for the school to run the course.

Recently-revealed evidence suggests that the dearth of sign-ups might have been related to the grading practices followed by colleagues who teach AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and AP Environmental Science. The case was laid out in a previous post.

Students have now signed up for their Fall classes. I have been informed that there is sufficient enrollment for the school to run both new AP Physics courses: AP Physics1 and AP Physics 2, in addition to three sections of Physics.

It's the "nightmare" I hoped for: three different courses to prepare ("three preps" as we say in the faculty lounge). AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2 are brand-new, never-been-taught courses, so it'll be like seating thread-forming screws. To make matters worse, I intend to redesign our Physics course, aligning it more closely to Next Generation Science Standards and to our adopted textbook.

Here's some information on the new AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2 courses being launched in 2014-15.