Category: Science Education

I haven’t read How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom yet, but it is available to read online, and a quick skim of it enticed me to come back soon for more. From the web site: How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you even begin to persuade high school students that mathematical...

I made it across the Mississippi today! Guess that means I’m in “the West.” I crossed the Big Muddy where it isn’t so big, nor so muddy, in Brainerd, MN. If memory serves me right, Brainerd is the city where Marge Gunderson is from in the movie Fargo. Well, put a physics teacher behind the wheel of a car for...

The capstone of my time here was a talk by George Coyne, SJ. Coyne talk was titled “Dance of the Fertile Universe: Cosmic and Human Evolution.”Coyne is the former Director of the Vatican Observatory (1978-2006), and has written extensively debunking the “Intelligent Design” theory. He gave a quick history of the universe (“if the universe is one year old, scientists...

Today was kind of a slow day. I let myself sleep in–till 8:00 🙂 I saw one plenary speaker who discussed his role in international physics education. I found it interesting at the time, but can’t remember many of the details now. The second plenary speaker was Janet Guthrie, the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500, speaking on...

I’m settled in the dorms, and have been sharing with a nice guy from outside Ann Arbor (“NOT” UM, our colors are green). He’s checking out tonight, so I’ll have the room to myself tonight. Sunday I spent the morning in two workshops, the first on using VPython (a computer programming language) to have students create models of physical actions...

Today we rode the “Human Air Puck.” You sit on a piece of plywood with a vacuum in your hands. The vacuum blows air through a hole under the plywood, and you float along. You can see a video of me riding it here. Caution: It’s a big file (2 MB). I’m not sure the exact format of the video...