Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Fall 2012 Meeting of the APS New England Section and the AAPT
Volume 57, Number 15
Friday–Saturday, November 9–10, 2012; Williamtown, Massachusetts
Session E1: Teaching Physics |
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Chair: Kannan Jagannathan, Amherst College Room: TPL 203 |
Saturday, November 10, 2012 8:00AM - 8:12AM |
E1.00001: InterLACE: Interactive Learning and Collaboration Environment Gary Garber A growing body of research has shown two things: (1) collaborative design-based inquiry activities show remarkable gains in students' understanding of science and (2) such activities are largely absent in the classroom because they can be challenging to implement. In order to rectify the current situation, the Interactive Learning and Collaboration Environment, or InterLACE, project seeks to design a suite of technological tools that facilitates class-wide collaborative sense-making. To that end, we have created an idea aggregation tool that enables students to upload their verbal and pictorial representations of science concepts to a Web-based platform that can then display these artifacts on a centrally located screen, thus encouraging discussion and debate among the students in an iterative process, which will not only help refine their thinking but also grant them ownership of the learning process. InterLACE is part of a multi-year program in which a dozen high school physics teachers are collaborating with researchers at Tufts University to develop these classroom educational technology tools for promoting inquiry-based education. By participating in the technology-design project, teachers are experiencing the inquiry process as well as developing tools that will facilitate using inquiry-based methods in their classrooms. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 10, 2012 8:12AM - 8:24AM |
E1.00002: Explorers in the Classroom, Space and History Elizabeth Cavicchi Across historical time, people have wonder, observed and explored what is up, out, above, and beyond us. As these explorers go deeper in observing, always they come upon further unknowns and curiosities. Students in my classroom find themselves becoming colleagues with explorers in the past. Students delves into stories of their predecessors, evolve their own observations and experiments in the space around us, and imagine possibilities for future projects. The underlying support for the students' explorations, discussions and wonderment is the research pedagogy of critical exploration in the classroom, developed by Elanor Duckworth from the work of Jean Piaget, B\"arbel Inhelder and the Elementary Science Study. Curriculum emerges through students' involvement and curiosity with materials of science and history, each other, and the teacher. The explorers are here; I invite you into their stories! [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 10, 2012 8:24AM - 8:36AM |
E1.00003: Fascinations with Flight Danielle Goldie, Michaela Danek, Joshua Mishrikey Reading the words of Galileo, Kepler, the Wright brothers, and Armstrong (among others), in addition to doing critical explorations of phenomena related to motion, air, mass, space, and flight, has piqued our interest in building model rockets and gliders. We continue to explore scientific phenomena as we follow our curiosities and the questions that arise. What we build, how we build it, and which phenomena challenge our thinking and further pique our curiosities are all yet to be determined! We will discuss the evolution of our thinking and how we might apply discoveries regarding our own learning to our teaching practice. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 10, 2012 8:36AM - 8:48AM |
E1.00004: Exploring Scientific Phenomena Danielle Goldie, Michaela Danek, Joshua Mishrikey It is a rare opportunity to be able to follow one's curiosities in the science classroom, moving beyond lab protocols and textbooks to come to one's own understanding of basic scientific phenomena. In this talk, we will discuss our experiences with ``critical exploration" - the joys of playing with (and reading about) science, the discomforts of not-knowing, and the satisfactions of trusting our observations and questions above all else. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 10, 2012 8:48AM - 9:00AM |
E1.00005: Man-Made ``Global Warming'' (AGW): A Critical-Thinking Approach to Exposing Some of Its Scientific and Methodological Flaws Laurence I. Gould ``The temperature of the Earth is increasing dangerously! Rising sea levels could flood cities! Polar bears are threatened! Glaciers are melting! And human beings are responsible, mainly, because of their activities which emit greenhouse gases.'' Such alarming scenarios are similar to the ones being propagated by various scientists, politicians, and educators as well as through the major news media and in the movies. But are those scenarios true? That is the question addressed by this talk.\\[4pt] [1] Major Reference: \textit{Climate Change Reconsidered ---} http://www.nipccreport.org/index.html\\[0pt] [2] Nobel Laureate in Physics, Ivar Giaever, public presentation, \textit{The Strange Case of Global Warming} critiquing AGW (Lindau 2012 conference of Nobel Laureates) --- http://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/{\#}/Video?id$=$1410\\[0pt] [3] Articles illustrating issues (pro and con) about AGW can be found in the \textit{NES APS Newsletters} beginning with the Fall 2007 issue --- http://www.aps.org/units/nes/newsletters [Preview Abstract] |
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