A lesson to accompany Understanding Car Crashes

Understanding Car Crashes: It's Basic Physics was produced by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in 2000. They've done what they could to make sure no physics classroom is without the VHS or DVD. In 2010, they uploaded the 22-minute, Griff Jones-hosted video to YouTube.

I always liked it, but didn't know where to use it. This year I was able to carve out a few days between the last unit test of the first semester and final exams. My first semester is all mechanics, all the time. So it seemed like a good match.

Here's my student worksheet: YouTube Physics: Danger and Safety in Car Crashes @ TPT

And here's the video, itself.

Understanding Car Crashes: It's Basic Physics



My lesson continues after the video is over by inviting students to research vehicle safety ratings for two cars they might ride in at IIHS's website (http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings).

By the way, if you haven't seen my YouTube Physics page, check it out. You'll find even more engaging video lessons.

The Dark Side of the Earth - mini-lesson revision

If you haven't seen this 5-minute Vimeo gem, I first talked about it here. Go there and watch it.

I developed a mini-lesson to accompany the video so as to create what would now be called a flipped-classroom lesson. Of course, I shared!

But I wasn't happy with how that turned out. So I reworked it a little bit. The rework makes things the student work aspect more visual-spatial.

YouTube Geophysics: Amazing Views of Earth on Vimeo

A Car Talk Puzzler that Thinking Physics people can solve

Car Talk Puzzler for the week of 11/23/13: Two trains are on a collision course. The trains are heading toward each other with identical speeds. When they are a certain distance apart from each other, a bee flies from the front of one train toward the other at constant speed. When it reaches the front of the other train, the bee turns around and flies back to the first train. The process repeats until the trains collide and the bee is squished.

The question: How far does the bee fly in the process?

To answer, you'll need the particulars: the distance between the trains when the bee begins its journey, the speed of the trains, and the speed of the bee. For these particulars (and the means by which you can enter your correct answer for the chance to win a prize), proceed to

The Car Talk Puzzler.

(Lewis Carroll Epstein's Thinking Physics)

A wee set of photos from NCNAAPT FM13 Carondelet

NCNAAPT FM13



These are the best of what I got at the Fall Meeting of the Northern California and Nevada section of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The event was Saturday, November 16 at Carondelet High School in Concord.

All captured on my little spy-cam of a Canon PowerShot S100. It's not a speedy auto focuser, but it's so small as to be fairly innocuous. And it's a digicam rather than a DSLR, so no shutter noise. Trade-offs.

Egg Toss 2013

Linsey Marr wins NIH New Innovator Award

While I realize that their brief time in high school gets smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror as years roll by, I reserve the right to take pride in the accomplishments of any of my 3500+ former students.

Linsey Marr (RAHS '92) set the river on fire while she was at Rio. Beyond being a top graduate, she earned gold on Rio's Science Olympiad team in its first trip to nationals (Auburn University in Alabama, 1992).

Of course, she left Rio over twenty years ago. She switched from MIT to neighboring Harvard and set the Charles on fire with her engineering awesomeness. She earned advanced degrees at UC Berkeley. These days, she professes Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech.

The National Institutes for Health (NIH) is now taking their turn at recognizing Marr's brilliance via their New Innovator Award. It's kind of a big deal. How big? North of $2,000,000 in research funding big. Linsey's been an unstoppable innovator and problem-solver since… forever. How delightful to see this prestigious honor awarded to her.

See Virginia Tech's coverage for full details.

Although we at Rio may not be entitled to take any credit for her professional accomplishments at this point, we are certainly entitled to offer our congratulations to someone who walked our wee campus years ago.

Congratulations, Linsey! We are so proud of you.

Carl Sagan Day - Neil deGrasse Tyson's new Cosmos

In case you haven't seen this yet. (It got past me somehow.)

Carl Sagan Day 2013 - Pale Blue Dot

This one never gets old.



Carl Sagan Day.

As ever, my Cosmos in the Classroom curriculum materials are available to all. I'm using them this year in Physics as I have in the past for AP Physics: one episode per unit, sometimes shown in class the day after a unit test, and sometimes assigned as homework.

Last year, Netflix streamed episodes of Cosmos. They don't anymore. Hulu's Cosmos page anticipates the Neil deGrasse Tyson "reboot". (They did, anyway; the title graphic had been Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, Tyson's title. Looks like they've now gone back to a "Cosmos: Carl Sagan" motif. The full title of Sagan's series was Cosmos: A Personal Journey.)

Sorry Miss Ping—you just got… Disillusioned!

Awesome precision stunt work artistry, yes?



That kind of thing takes "mad skillz" and years of practice.

Not with Ping Pong, knives, or pineapples. With video editing. But you need to do better than that if you don't want to get busted by Captain Disillusion!

Take it away, Capt. D!



Love the fake drop-in ads, the foot stab, the Star Trek and Portlandia references, and the super-cheesy crash-endo.

Visit Captain Disillusion's website for all things CD!

The Baloney Detection Kit: new video question set

I've been showing Michael Shermer's 15-minute Baloney Detection Kit video to students in my physics classes for years. It's a great little gem about the methods of science that's much, much better than the tired old, fabricated "Scientific Method" lessons and posters that still seem to proliferate in science classrooms at schools.

And I've developed video question sets for countless episodes of Mechanical Universe and the whole set of Paul Hewitt's Conceptual Physics Alive!

But inspiration for a question set for the Baloney Detection Kit video eluded me. Until now. The information is delivered at a pretty rapid pace: to rapid for students to contemplate and write much while the video is in progress.

 So I went with a "matching" theme for the bulk of the content. A graphic interpretation for one, and a multi-correct for the third. I'm happy with how it turned out.

Baloney Detection Kit - student question set.
Baloney Detection Kit - teacher's answer key.

And, of course, the video: Baloney Detection Kit (Michael Shermer).



As with nearly all the video question sheets I produce for my own classroom use, the name-perdiod-date box appears as a strip of old-fashioned film (with sprocket holes). The video's YouTube video identification is also listed (hJmRbSX8Rqo). If you google that ID, the video is the first hit. And yes, I dressed up the title area to mimic a YouTube look and feel. If you've got substance, it's OK to flash a bit of style.

The point of all video question sets is to prevent the use of the video in the classroom from becoming a passive experience for students. Sometimes adults scoff at this notion and assume the children will sit quietly and reflect contemplatively—the way adults might—during a video presentation. I'm here to tell you that that is simply not the case.

For more quick, classroom-ready mini-lessons relating to skepticism, see my Skepticism in the Classroom page.