Tag: Activities

Paper Companion Activities for Pivot Interactives
Activities · Teaching Methods

Paper Companion Activities for Pivot Interactives

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

You know how I feel about online work! (Looking for Physics Classroom Companion Worksheets? Find them Here!)

When I took high school physics almost everything was online. From physics classroom assignments, to the dreaded WebAssign, it was online. And because it was online, I like others, gamed the system (pre chat GPT). You know a certain number is going to show up somewhere in the answers? Enter it in all the blanks for the first submission so you can focus on the actual calculations. On the flip side was the part where you tried the problem so many times by the time you got it right you had no idea what actually worked. For the better part of my career I’ve been vehemently against all forms of online homework. There’s something about that screen that just puts a stop to the idea of using scratch paper for novice learners and we can’t have that!

(For what it’s worth, when AP went all digital I did NOT feel the urge to go digital in my classroom. I continued to do everything on paper. When APs came around I found my goal was acheived: I proctored the macro exam and did a count. 80% of physics students were using their scratch paper during the exam, while only 30% of non-physics students used their paper.)

The first exception I made to online learning was Pivot Interactives. I was using Peter’s work back when they were “Direct Measurement Videos” which meant I had paper copies originally, anyway. As Pivot upped their game (including deep randomization and autograding) I started using some of these assignments since it sure made my life easier!

However, what I’m finding with my students this year is that like my Webassign days, students are doing the minimum to get all the green checks. This looks like not reading the prompts that explain what they’re about to do next and why, not actually collecting the data for the graph and totally missing the connections between the sample measurements and the data collection.

So, I’ve started to reimplement some paper versions.

The Activities: A Journey of Trial and Error

Earlier this year I assigned the helmet collisions activity. I added a prompt at the end that requested students to do the following:

  • What was the purpose of the activity?
  • Describe the procedure for conducting the investigation
  • Describe the calculations you made and why we made each calculation. You should include details regarding your values!
  • Describe what we learned from this activity about helmets as it relates to the impulse-change in momentum relationship.

This was ok, but I, arguably did this a bit hastily. I realized I wanted these documents handwritten and maybe a bit more depth/scaffholding.

A few weeks later I assigned the Explosions (Not Really) activity.

I knew that students would totally ditch all of the methods we had been using, so I decided to give them a paper to complete before the activity that related to the activity. This required them to complete the calculations with similar, but easy numbers and then have me check their work prior to the activity. This got a good chunk of kids on board, but some still struggled with the transference.

Still not completely satisfied, this past week I assigned the “Intro to Transverse Waves” activity. In this activity students are going to linearize a graph. This is a skill we don’t really cover in my regular level physics, but I like doing it at this point in the year because it’s such a powerful tool. As I anticipated, many students were ignoring the text about linearization completely. I chose a different approach to the paper copy.

I gave students this document which contains the following prompts:

First, I asked them to describe to me some of the new vocab as well as how we obtained our measurements

Next, I use a modified template from the Patterns Curriculum when students write conclusions in labs where we have graphs. It looks like this:

After investigating the behavior _______________, I conclude that there is a ______________________relationship between the [independent variable name]  and the [dependent variable name] As the [independent variable] kept increasing, the [dependent variable]_____________________________. This system of a ___________________ can be mathematically modeled as:

[write the final equation]

where the constant  [slope value]  is the [description of slope for this experiment] . 

I require students to write the ENTIRE paragraph from start to finish. This is not a fill in the blank activity.

This is currently my favorite interaction of the paper follow up and I’ll probably build more of these moving forward. I’m really in love with the patterns physics conclusions because it really requires students to put everything together.

Grading

I’ve noticed there’s a VERY strong correlation on these summaries between students who took the activity seriously and learned from it, vs students who did not. Because of this, the only thing I really need to grade with care is the conclusion paragraph itself. If students did the lab correctly, this paragraph looks great. If not, they usually don’t do well on this.

Do you do anything like this? What does it look like? How do you support genuine learning using online platforms?

Teaching Students How to Score Better
Activities · Classroom Issues · In My Class Today

Teaching Students How to Score Better

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

At the American Association of Physics Teachers Winter Meeting I had the privilege of presenting in literally the best session of the entire conference (no bias here at all). Magically, all four of our presentations beautifully complimented one another and related deeply to engaging students in metacognitive skills.

I transitioned districts this year. In my previous district I worked with a lot of students in the gifted program, a lot of students in the creative and performing arts program (who are basically also gifted) and within this culture and climate, all kids benefitted, even the ones who were not in a special program. For years I was able to get students on board with the Expert Game, and the Science of Learning Physics some trust in the process, and good relationships. This year, that hasn’t quite cut it. I’d been thinking about a way to somehow “teach” students in a way that feel like “teaching” to them about how to learn, study and grow so they might buy into the idea (which is really nothing new).

I had been digging back into Powerful Teaching and some kind of workshop was begining to materialize, albeit very, very fuzzy. And then, at Winter Meeting, Aaron Titus gets up and shares that he offers a “How to Do Better on the Test” workshop which turns out to be “How to Learn”

The workshop is grounded in the work of Dr. Saundra McGuire. There are a lot of resources of hers around the web, like this lecture here on metacognition, but primarily she has a sweet little book called Teach Yourself How to Learn. It’s short, sweet, to the point and a lot of fun to read. Dr. McGuire is a retired chemistry professor and Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success. She is also an awardee of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Mentorship.

Immediately in chapter one she discusses one of the aspects about college that is hardest for students: getting As and Bs in high school often comes down to memorization and regurgitation. Now, before you come with fire I know that many of us (especially if we teach AP, and definitely if you enjoy my blog) are making students do incredible things. But I also know that you can probably name more than a handful of colleagues who don’t push their students beyond memorization. Teachers who produce study guides that are basically a carbon copy of the exam. Exams that are almost all multiple choice and the math is strictly plug and chug. The dreaded triangle to “support” students doing equations like F=ma. And if not the teachers themselves, some really great high school students simply don’t get pushed beyond needing to simply show up to class to learn the information. They can get away with minimal to no homework and no studying and still do okay in the class because we see them every single day and they work hard in our rooms.

So the workshop starts by introducing students to Bloom’s Taxonomy and we have a conversation about what level they are operating at most of the time, compared to what level they need to operate at for AP Physics. What level do they think they need to operate at in college?

And sure enough, if you pull up the science practices and skills for AP the word “create” is literally all over the place. The top of the pyramid.

From here we took a look at a recent exam question. First I asked them a simple question:

Which of the following is true about work?

  1. Work is effort
  2. Work is a change in energy
  3. Work is a force

They all know the answer. And this is a recall answer.

Then I showed them the exam question (they did really poorly on). While the question fundamentally was about the fact that work is a change in energy, what they were asked to do was apply the concept of taking an integral to calculate work and then create a graphical representation.

From here we discussed the differences between studying and learning and posed the question, “which would you work harder for? To study to get an A on a test, or prepare to teach the material to the class?”

The latter half of the workshop is about sharing strategies for doing homework, reading the text, and using practice exams. (You can find all of these in Dr. McGuire’s work and resources!)

I summarized some of these along with my personal favorites into the following list:

  • When you get home from school, write down everything you can remember from class that day, then compare with your class notes to identify/fill the gaps
  • Did you solve some problems? Grab a clean sheet of paper and solve the problem again. Compare to the example and make notes regarding your forgetting/gaps
  • Create a concept map to tie together big ideas and conceptual details
  • Make “teacher notes” as if you were preparing to teach the material
  • Aim for 100% mastery when you sit to study, not 85-90

As we wrapped up, the most important part of this workshop was asking students to make a commitment to do something different in the next 24 hours. I had students submit these along with some additional reflections. There were two that stood out to me today. One student reflected, “The reason this class is so challenging for me is because I haven’t had a class besides maybe Calc that required me to be at that creating level.”

A second student made an observation that knocked me over in joy:

“Physics is more than just who is smarter and has the ability to think at a higher level.”

And with that, I’m signing off. I’m going to attach my version of the slides, but everything is very much thanks to the work of Aaron Titus and Saundra McGuire.

Waves Intro Activity with Virtual Ripple Tank
Activities · In My Class Today

Waves Intro Activity with Virtual Ripple Tank

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

When I was in college my E&M professor introduced me to the falstad apps. It was literally this guy who created a bunch of different JAVA sims. E&M is notoriously challenging due to needing to think and reason in three-dimensional space, so we were encouraged to use the apps to help us visualize static fields.

When I started teaching I decided to poke around and see what else Falstad had created. One of his simulations I use year over year is his ripple tank. It’s incredibly powerful and way less cumbersome than setting up the actual water tables (which was just unfeasible being the only physics teacher with 3 preps)

I just finished my intro activity today so I figured I might as well share. You can find the simulations here.

When the app opens it’s pretty simple. A “faucet” wave like the one in the Phet sim is present. You can see the sliders to adjust for damping and frequency. You can move the source where ever you like and can even toggle into 3D view

What’s pretty awesome is the list of “examples” you can select from the drop down menu.

Single slit, double slit, two-sources, refraction, total internal reflection and a whole slew of topics. You also have complete freedom to add to the simulation using the “add” menu bar at the top.

For my students, we start our waves unit in the following way.

First, we watch the slo mo guys film this ginormous 90 foot wave... with ducks…. which is awesome.

There’s a lot of really great phenomena here. From constructive interference, to refraction and lenses (pay attention to the grid image in the column) to the idea that waves transport energy, not matter.

Next, students head to the sim. I provide them directions on this document and the record their observations on this one.

This activity typically takes a class period and a half. For my advanced students they can usually finish in a class period or I can assign the rest for homework.

When students return the following day, I put this graphic organizer up and prompt them to write their own definition of the behavior based on their observations and a diagram to go with it

During the unit I come back to this app quite often.

We discuss how the design of an auditorium is based on nodal lines

I can drag the single source around to demonstrate doppler effect and sonic booms

If there’s a phenomena I want students to be able to observe, pause and manipulate… there’s usually a way to do it.

Written Companions for Physics Classroom Practice
Activities

Written Companions for Physics Classroom Practice

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

The Physics Classroom holds a place near and dear to my heart.

For years I thought it was my special secret. Long, long ago the url was something like physicsclassroom.glenbrook225.k12.il.us because it was a site hosted on my High School’s sever. The main author was Tom Henderson, one of the best educators at GBS. Tom taught the most advanced freshman in chem-phys, as well as the conceptual physics course. He had a great handle on meeting kids where they were at and explaining physics in a way that made sense as a student.

It wasn’t until much later I realzied that physics classroom was a well known resource for physics teachers across the nation.

As a student, something I realized was that what I found fun, challenging and helpful to my learning in physics was often a barrier and frustration to my classmates. Getting an “O Drats” without a way or opportunity to reflect or see where an error was made became maddening and frustrating. At the same time the essence of drilling a tiny skill is so valuable for long term learning.

I steered clear of most online homeworks for a long, long time (webassign also traumatized me). I knew that too often the real work that needed to happen to actually learn was skipped by most students in search of elusive green checks. By the time you got the checks, you had no memory of what actually worked.

Over the last few years I’ve started developing handouts to go along with some of the physics classroom activity sets. I only have a few, but enough that I feel like they are worth sharing publicly at this point. The goal is to get students thinking, writing and documenting as they work through the physics classrom activities. It also provides me with documentation. I will admit, another motivation for this was the fact that I did not have a paid subscription to task tracker. Now that I do, I’m developing more of these and will continue to share and post them here as I develop them.

What I’ve found is that more students are able to move through more problems with more success and confidence. Definitely a win! They hate me for slowing them down with the paper documentation, but I see it as a win.

Without further ado, here is the list:

Kinematics

Match That Graph Interactive

In the paper document (preview below) I ask students to first describe the motion in words. This way, when they watch the little car drive across the screen and make the dot diagram, they know what they are looking for

Kinematics Calculator Pad Sets

In the paper document, students are prompted to make their picture, their chart of variables and solve the problem by selecting an equation then substituting values as needed. This is a second version (sample below) that is specific to set 12, and provides more room for student work.

Momentum

Concept Checker: Case Studies Impulse and Force

The first few pages of this document are notes in which we construct the momentum bar charts for different situations and identify what is the same and different. Then students go to the concept checker and I ask them to create the bar charts and document the similarities/differences prior to making their selections. A preview is below and here is the handout

Work and Energy

This document can be used for the calcpad sets. I ask students to draw a picture, construct a bar chart, and solve the problem starting with conservation of energy. Preview below

Waves

Open Tube Concept Builder (can be used for closed tubes as well)

Document here, preview below

How I Teach… Forces (Intro, the Observational Experiments)
Activities · Teaching Methods

How I Teach… Forces (Intro, the Observational Experiments)

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

The first set of posts I wrote for this series was about momentum because I made such a large shift from how I used to teach to how I currently teach.

In the same vein my teaching of forces has also changed.

In the past my force unit looked like this:

  1. Inertia Day! Lots of Demos, initiation into the inertia club with club cards (you hold the card on your index finger with a penny on top and figure out how to flick the card out from the penny)
  2. F=ma. Define it, notes, define force diagrams, practice force diagrams. Practice F=ma problems.
  3. One day on action-reaction. Gloss over it; “it’s easy”

I cringe writing this out now. It was so boring! Inertia and action-reaction felt like fluff. We don’t need fluff!

Currently, my unit structure is designed with the big ideas in mind. (Because, tenet 3: Order Matters, Language Matters) I was excited to see that the idea that teaching in a structure that models the thinking we are targetting to improve outcomes is actually supported by research, so my model draws on Lei Bao’s frameworks for force:

One of my biggest frustrations was students putting random “F(applied)” on force diagrams. It irked me to no end!

So starting with the framework for Newton’s Third Law, I turned my force unit on its head. The fundamental piece we begin with is:

A force is an interaction between objects

Observational Experiments

We start with the activity from Pivot Interactives where two cars collide.

Students are asked to separately write what they observe about the car motion and also what they observe about the force acting on each car.

After making the observations we discuss.

The primary aspect students recognize is that heavier/faster cars result in bigger forces. That’s all well annd good, but what about the force that each car experiences. Even though they’ve literally just witnessed and recorded it, they still want the heavier one to hit harder than the light one within the same collision! We closely observe this together and see that, indeed, the forces are always the same.

This is what allows us to define a force as an interaction between objects. Without a second object pushing on the ring, the ring won’t squish. Since the force is something that happens between, it must be equal and opposite.

This very small shift has been a game-changer. It is very rare for me to have students putting totally random forces on objects because “it should have one”.

From here we dive into Eugina Etkina’s ISLE cycle.

Students are asked to hold a heavy and a light object in each hand, palms up and then represent those objects with arrows on a diagram. Students are asked to label each arrow with the object interaction. This is a fun one because a lot of kids are quick to label “gravity” but when I inform them that gravity, is not in fact, an object, they have a moment of pause. Eventually all students arrive at the correct diagrams: equal sized forces on each object, bigger forces on the heavier object.

From here I diverge between AP and regular physics. In regular physics we will go directly to the mass vs weight lab where students will ultimately derive the expression F(earth) = mg. With AP we continue to follow a modeling cycle with experiments with a bowling ball down the hallway: rolling, constant force forward, constant force backward. Then I ask how we could have constant velocity AND constant force. Students are quick to say “push down” (and we are fresh off of projectiles where x and y are independent!). Then realize if we alternate “taps” that will do it (balanced forces). Students are asked to represent and reason by drawing a complete motion map, an accompanying force diagram and then look for patterns. In this way students then recognize that balanced forces will result in constant motion (including v=0) and unbalanced forces result in accelerations. For homework students will complete two exercises from the Active Learning Guide from Etkina’s book where they will continue to practice drawing motion maps and force diagrams together in order to find relevant patterns. From here we get ready for labs!

Up next… labs labs and more labs!
Quantitative Experiments with Forces

Activities · Teaching Methods

How I Teach… Energy Part 4 – Energy Activities!

Marianna Ruggerio9 Comments

This is part of a series!
Part 1 (Work) Part 2 (energy bar charts) Part 3 (problem solving)

I have this lab I received from a colleague, it’s an iteration of a lab I’ve seen in other places. Basically an object goes down a ramp, gets caught by a paper catch/index card etc and students are looking for some iteration of work and energy.

In the version I have students are asked to find a relationship between height and distance. The cool thing about this is it ends up that height is directly proportional to distance and related by the coefficient of kinetic friction alone.

Student’s work looks like this:

Students are asked to complete the lab with a hot wheel car and then again with a small mass attached to the car. To students’ surprise the lines are not identical. This really bothers students until we discuss what we were actually looking for. See, the lines are still parallel, but the car with more mass is going to have a greater momentum at the bottom and will require a greater impulse to stop. It’s a fantastic conversation piece.

Student generated graph from lab

I really enjoy this lab because it requires students to consider a new problem and then apply that knowledge to a lab setting. Research has shown that students don’t really learn content in the lab, they learn lab skills. I was always a little frustrated with the disconnect between all of the work students put into the theory and then the lab results themselves. So this time I changed things up.

Instead of giving students the lab hand out and letting them work in groups, when students walked into the room they were put into visibly random groups. Visibly random grouping just means you create the random groups in front of students so they see it was truly random. I’ve been immersed in the book Building Thinking Classrooms and the research on this is really cool.

Once students are in their groups and at a white board that is vertically mounted, I’m in the middle of the room at a lab table with the lab set-up. I verbally explain the set up and that I want them to derive a mathematical model for the relationship between height and distance.

Vertical whiteboarding is really cool and has several advantages. First, students are standing which puts them into a more active position, this gets more of them working. Second, it’s really easy to just look around and snag ideas from other classmates. Third, since they’re already standing it’s really easy to move around the room and discuss with other groups. The first time I did this what astounded me was the sheer number of students talking. Instead of it being maybe 4 or 5 leaders it was nearly everyone in the room! There was so much collaboration and ownership of learning it was magical.

Taking a peek to get ideas is easy!

So I did this with the first part of the lab. Next, I asked them to sketch what the graph will look like with the two lines. Almost all of the students sketched the two lines on top of each other. I want them to have the experience of their data not aligning with their previous ideas and having to reconsider, so we left it at that. Then students were off.

I’m going to finish this lab this week, so I’ll have to come back to update this post, but I love this activity and vertical whiteboarding gets a 10/10 every time.