Online Class for 9/30

Class on Tuesday, September 30th was an online activity. The activity showed weights, that you could attach to springs to see the friction that the weights caused. Putting heavier weights on the spring caused the spring to be more stretched out, and fall down faster. Having lighter weight barely moved the spring. On the website you could also change the softness/hardness of the spring as well as more or less friction. When I changed the softness and hardness of the spring I didn't notice much chance to the way the spring bounced. But, when I change the amount of friction it was very noticeable. If you put it to no friction the spring would bounce a lot, but with lots of friction the spring bounced once but then came to a stop. It was also interesting to see the different changes of the planets. If you changed the button to the weight in Jupiter the spring stretched out a lot. This website would be a fun way to show elementary children the ways of friction. It is a great interactive website.

Web Seminar

Instead of class on 9/25, we were required to attend an online web seminar. This was the first time that I have ever attended an online web seminar. It was a great experience for me, and I learned a lot of things from it. Going online with other teachers gave us a great chance to talk with them about some things that they did for their own class. I thought when someone asked what ways do you do experiments with a little budget was a great question. Some of the teachers had great ideas, like using baby bottles instead of cylinders and so on. I thought the seminar itself went really smoothly. Although, there was technical difficulties with the speaker cutting in and out throughout. Overall it was a very great experience for me. I also thought it was kind of enjoyable to see that professionals who are out in there job are still looking for ways to stay on top of their education. The seminar discussed stars, from their birth to their death. It was an interesting way to go about learning about this.

Class 9/23

Class on 9/23 was just much of the review of the reading guide. I thought that this class was very helpful in review for the quiz that we had to take later that night. It was a nice chance to see other students views on the questions that we were asked to answer, and other ideas that I could put for my own answers.

Class 9/18

Today, we got to do our Graphing Your Motion experiment with the hand held computers. The point of this experiment was to use a motion detector to graph your motion in quick movements and slow movements. We set up our motion detector in the room and used a clip board to have a flat surface on us. First we moved back slowly, causing little movement on our graph. Then, we did the same thing but moved back more quickly. Doing this caused more movement on the graph. Then, we were supposed to try and match the graph that was shown on the computer. To do this, we had to go forward towards the motioon detecotr, back, forward, then back again. I thought this part of the experiment was fun, because it made you really think about how it worked to get the movement correct.

Class 9/16

This class was a rather crazy one. We start an experiment using little hand held computers. After much confusion it was realized that the new technology wasn't misbehaving it was some technical errors. This showed me that things can go wrong when your teaching, so you just have to have some back up plans.

9/11

Class on this Thursday was basically review of our last experiment and took some notes. We found out the equation for kinetic energy which is KE=1/2mv f2. Also we found out that the round container contained more kisses than the tall one, even though all but one group agreed they looked the same. We were told that cilinder objects can hold more with their bubbled out sides than the straight sides of a tall skilly object. Our class notes were about motion. We learned what motion was, the equation for speed, and some graphing skills. Speed=distance/time.

Class 9/9

For class on Tuesday, September 9, we took some notes throughout the class. We went over some general things such as "science is about thinking and doing...", how science is in our lives, and the scientific method. The scientific method is: start with a question, a tentative "guess", a prediction about what would happen if the hypothesis is correct, experemental test, and a statement that ties together the important parts. Also during this class we went over the "Kiss Experiment". It was an experiment that had us finding the energy of a kiss. We also guessed which jar had more, the tall one or the round one.

Class 9/4

Class for our first day was pretty typical. We just went over the sylibus, made name tags, and got to know each other. After this class, it seems as though things throughout this should be pretty fun and interesting.