My students need ping pong balls, twine, balloons, and cups so they can become familiar with basic physics and chem at home, then come to class ready to go!
In my chem and physics classes, every minute counts. We've go a lot of exploring to do, a lot of labs to mess through, a lot of making to engineer, and a whole world of physical phenomena to explore. And it all has to immediately be applicable to students' real lives. Hence Take-Home Lab Kits!
I teach at an ethnically and economically diverse school; my students range from homeless or foster care to trust fund babies, skewing toward the middle class.
What they have in common is the fact that every student auditions into the school in a specific art. That means my students are studying their art for 2-4 hours per day, every day. This leaves them with less time for academics (and everything else, really).
So in order to give them the most knowledge bang for the least time buck, I'm going to institute take-home physics and chemistry labs this year. These labs won't be time-consuming -- in fact they should save the students time -- and they'll be as low tech and safe as humanly possible, but these labs will give the students the chance to really play around with physics and chem ideas. So many of my students are experience-deficient; this is an attempt to give them real experiences that will feed into their being able to use physics or chem in academia and in real life.
My Project
We need ping pong balls, twine, balloons, and cups so they can become familiar with basic physics and chem at home, then come to class ready to go! Each student will check out a box with equipment in it for the entire year's worth of take home labs. Among the equipment in that box will be balloons, cups, straws, string and a ping pong ball.
The balloons are for Newton's Laws experiments (rocket ship, etc) and Bernoulli devices. The cups are part of the ruler and cup balance, and generally useful when making catapults. The straws are Newton, Bernoulli, atmospheric pressure, density column, and building material. The string gets used for everything, especially waves and motors. And the ping pong balls are enormous fun -- Bernoulli in multiple ways, electrostatics, and atmospheric pressure.
My students get each academic class for 80 min, three times a week.
That gives us 152 hours class time per year. Schools where classes meet every day, even if only for 50 min a class, end up with 158 hrs/yr. If classes meet 55 min each, that's 174 hrs/yr -- or five more weeks of instruction than my students have. We have to do a lot, we have to do it fast, and we have to do it well. These take-home lab boxes will help my students by giving them extra time to play with the concepts of physics.
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