May 2009

Hands on Science Sunday: Feeling pressured?

May 31, 2009

Here’s today’s science classroom activity.  We’re surrounded by the crushing weight of layers of atmosphere above us, but we don’t feel it.  Why?  Our perception is tuned to differences, not absolutes.  If we were in a completely pink world, we would notice anything that wasn’t pink, but (I’m pretty sure) after a few minutes, we [...]

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New blog! The ARTFUL AMOEBA tells us about moss that swings both (all?) ways

May 30, 2009

My friend and fellow science writer Jen Frazer has started a new blog (well, two actually, but let’s start with the first). I don’t know how she can spend a whole day at work writing copy, and then come home and spin out gorgeous and witty prose, but, hey, she didn’t win the AAAS Science [...]

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[Clickers in upper-division physics] 4. Tips for success

May 28, 2009

This is the last in a series of four posts about using clickers in upper division physics courses. We’ve conducted extensive research on what students think about clickers, in introductory and upper division physics (email me if you want links to our papers).  The survey of students who had used clickers in upper-division courses (across [...]

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Physics Toys Tuesday: Colored shadows

May 27, 2009

I’m not actually committing to posting a physics toy every Tuesday, but I’ll start small. One of my favorite places to watch people back at the Exploratorium was the colored shadows exhibit.  This one’s always a winner. Images from http://www.flickr.com/photos/soyunterrorista This is an example of color addition.  Remember this from grade school? I only remember [...]

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[Clickers in upper division physics] 3. The critics speak

May 27, 2009

This is part 3 of an ongoing set of posts about using clickers in upper division physics courses, as we’ve been doing at U. Colorado for several years. Arguments against using clickers in upper division We’ve heard plenty of arguments about why people don’t want to use clickers in the upper division. Here are a [...]

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Hands-on Science Sunday: Echoes from the Moon

May 25, 2009

Wow, super cool.  A group of schoolkids in Italy measured the distance from the earth to the moon using the delayed echo in the audio recording of Neil Armstrong’s famous “One small step…” speech. From the article in Technology review They used the open source audio editing program Audacity to measure the echo’s delay which [...]

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[Clickers in upper division physics] 2. What kinds of questions do we ask?

May 21, 2009

This is my second post in a series about using clickers in the upper division. A lot of people have trouble imagining what kinds of questions you might ask at the upper division. The challenge is to make them tough, but not too tough. You want students to have to think and argue about them, [...]

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[Clickers in Upper Division Physics] 1. What does it look like?

May 19, 2009

I recently gave a talk at the AAPT about how we’re using clickers in upper division physics, and I keep meaning to include this as a post here! I wonder, should I submit this to The Physics Teacher, perhaps? First off, you can download my powerpoint, as well as the accompanying videos, here. There are [...]

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Troublesome students in group work

May 19, 2009

There was an interesting discussion on a college level email list recently about classroom management, where an instructor was trying his darndest to create a group learning environment in his classroom, but ended up with a bunch of rowdy off-task students.  A whole plethora of responses flooded in with personal experiences on classroom management and [...]

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Hands-on Science Sunday: Atmosphere model

May 17, 2009

I’m going to try posting a regular feature here on sciencegeekgirl — Hands-on Science Sunday.  I figure, if I were a teacher, Sunday might be the day I’d appreciate getting an idea of a science classroom activity.  So, here you go.   Why do it? This is a good activity to help your students visualize [...]

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The importance of feeling stupid

May 14, 2009

I was just pointed to this wonderful essay about the importance of stupidity in scientific research (Martin Schwartz, Journal of Cell Science).  It’s a short and wonderful little essay, and points out what it is that is so satisfying about scientific research — and what makes it so hard.  And how so many students are [...]

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A tool to diagnose your students’ learning difficulties

May 12, 2009

One of our main messages here at the Science Education Initiative is that it’s important that teachers both find out what their students difficulties are, and then choose their instructional strategies accordingly. That sounds easy, but for the average college faculty (facing a sea of 200 faces) or the average K12 teacher (who has to [...]

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A long day at the Exploratorium…

May 5, 2009

Biologist Charlie Carlson over at my favorite alma mater (the Exploratorium museum of science in SF) snapped this photo of me, perky and bright-eyed… but my bench-mates?  Not so much.  Looks like they had a long day of interactive science. One thing we found curious about the photo was its graininess in the low light.  [...]

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Gender bias in teacher evaluations

May 2, 2009

I’m at the American Physical Society conference in Denver this weekend (a nice way to spend a rainy weekend) and heard a very interesting talk this morning by Zahra Hazari, from Clemson University on gender bias in how students evaluate their teachers.  It was a very nice study, iwth very interesting results.  She asked male [...]

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Why does soap form bubbles?

May 2, 2009

I got a good question on my Adopt a Physicist forum last week, from an 8th-grader named, for privacy purposes, “S.F.”  I asked them to look around for interesting things around them and ask me about the physics of them.  He/she wrote: Actually today I did notice some strange things.  I was washing my hands, and [...]

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