If you’re looking to beautify your classroom, here are some links to some free science posters. No guarantees as to quality, but these links should be a helpful start!
We see the darndest questions on teacher listservs. It seems that, at one school, there was a mystery to be solved. The boys’ urinals were often surrounded by a puddle of “liquid.” Were the urinals weeping water? Or were the boys purposely urinating on the floor (as the janitor believed)? And, most importantly, how can we use our good friend SCIENCE to solve this mystery, the teacher asked?
Is there a powder I can sprinkle on the floor that will turn a particular color?
A UV light to shine on the puddles that will fluoresce?
It turns out that, yes, there is such a device! Specifically created to detect pet urine stains, the Rug Doctor is here to help (and so are a plethora of other products). It’s a blacklight, and it turns out that certain molecules in urine (just like in semen and blood) will fluoresce. They use this at crime scenes too. “Fluorescent” means that a material absorbs light of one color, and then re-emits it in another color. Blacklight is ultraviolet, which is highly energetic light that is “too blue” for us to see. The fluorescent molecules absorb that light, which loses some energy in the process, and re-emit it in as light that’s lower energy (that we can see).
I used to study some fluorescent polymers that fluoresced in room light. They were beautiful. The liquid in the little vial seemed to glow (well, it did glow), this kind of chartreuse. The picture here isn’t from my research, but similar material.
Anyway. Back to the problem at hand. We weren’t quite sure how these blacklight devices would work for detecting urine in tile grout (which probably holds all kinds of things). And how would one know if you were detecting backsplatter, or intentional misbehavior?
One teacher helpfully added:
A couple solutions I’ve seen to encourage boys to aim properly- in a bathroom at a truck stop in Alaska, there were the normal plastic filter things over the drain, but they had a little propellor thing labeled “Restroom Roulette” If you directed the stream at it, it would spin around until you stopped and point at various things like “You’re a Winner!” or “Sorry, try again” etc. Most kids would get a kick out of that. I’ve also seen urinals where the realistic image of a fly or a spider is etched/painted onto the urinal at the “sweet spot” where you get the least splashes. Males apparently can’t resist trying to nail the bug to try to wash it down the drain.
“Visualized whirled pees?” responded one.
Other suggestions included:
You could change the school water supply to include small amounts of the super absorbent stuff (sodium acrylate?).
The simple remedy is to issue each boy a pair of vice grips set to clamp to a small circumference. This will restrict flow, encourage returning to class and giving new meaning toclamping down on a problem. (Raleigh McLemore)
I had hoped to avoid stepping into this subject out of fear it may be too deep for me.
Some things are too serious to joke about.
One of our more prolific contributors (Al Sefl) shared:
A classic book has been written about the trajectory of droplets caused by a liquid stream impinging on the urinal receptacle surfaces. I believe The Bathroom by Alexander Kira was the first and most comprehensive study of both male and female urinals with backsplatter patterns. It pointed out that most of the bathroom appliances were poorly designed and kept that way out of some misdirected sense of traditional design. … He came to the conclusion that the clear majority of receptacles were not scientifically designed to minimize splash droplets. Other conclusions included were that the height of male urinals were often above the stream source so the end of the stream, as it peter’s out so to speak, often drops below the lower edge of the urinal. The book was a text used in a course for one of my master’s degrees, Industrial Design. It was very obvious that a complete redesign of the western lavatory in general was needed.
Al Self
Who thinks urinals should have a sign posted over them stating:
MIND THE GAP
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I was recently reminded of this wonderful visualization of the processes inside the cell. As a physicist, I found this quite powerful in imagining this mysterious (and usually, to me, boring) microscopic world. It was created by a Harvard professor in conjunction with a scientific animation company. Here’s the video:
In my art and science visualization seminar we had quite an energetic discussion about this video, however. There seemed to be a lot of skepticism in the room about this visualization. “It’s not art,” claimed the artists in the room, and the scientists (who were not biologists) were suspicious of its scientific content. I’m here thinking this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they’re tearing it apart. What gives? Are we distrustful of something that looks slick and expensive, as opposed to something homegrown? I haven’t seen such resistance to people’s aesthetic garage experiments. Perhaps because the garage experiments are simply celebrating aesthetics, not trying to convey scientific content.
One aspect of this video, of course, is its emotional content, which can serve to motivate people to learn biology. It uses different camera angles, an movement, and music, to make the viewer feel that they are zooming around these dynamic views of the inside of the cell. In terms of how people learn information cognitively, this is also useful. Multiple representations of a phenomenon are very useful in helping people make sense of information. Most science content is presented quite abstractly. As our guest speaker Martin Kemp said, this isn’t the science lesson, it’s the teaser.
Certainly, this video doesn’t stand on its own — it needs verbal support. Presumably an instructor would use it before or after instruction where the content is more explicitly explained.
There is an emotional narrative here, said the seminar participants. How does that relate to the intellectual narrative. Does this compromise the science? One claimed that there is incredible intentionality depicted here. The processes we see aren’t random, it’s very cooperative, like a small city. These little things are working very hard to accomplish what they do. They’re not self-conscious, but still are active agents.
This is dangerous, several people argued. We don’t know if these objects have intentionality. It turns out that the Discovery Institute co-opted part of this video to illustrate that God exists in the cell.
But, I argued against this. The “intentionality” that people saw in this video, I think, was their own anthropomorphizing. There was no intentionality inherent in the video — only motion. Any intentionality is just a metaphor, just like the “selfish gene” is just a metaphor. It can help us to imagine these ideas by ascribing intentionality, perhaps, but we need to be very aware that it is just a metaphor.
So, I think that this video is great — it helps us imagine something we can’t usually see and relate to scientific content in a new way. Phooey on the naysayers. Does anyone agree with me?
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Create your own science zine, win a prize! This could be a really fun activity for a class. An 8-page booklet from a single 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper… that says something real about science! There are prizes in several age categories, and they have some simple instructions and templates for making them. This is part of the Year of Science celebration of 2009.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Do physics teachers have a role to play in teaching about population growth? One could argue that the study of physics is separate from the world of human concerns — it’s concerned with the physical laws governing how the world works. Our role is to educate students about these abstract laws. The rest is for philosophers.
One could also argue that, as critical thinkers, experts, and citizens of the world, our role is to help educate our students about issues critical to our world and our country. And as physicists, we have access to information that is relevant to the world — such as world energy demands, or the mathematics of population growth.
One of the physics teachers’ listservs I subscribe to recently had a spirited debate on this topic. After a rousing exchange, one physicist shared:
I was indoctrinated into the isolation view in my undergraduate and master’s programs. I was told by the structure of the physics courses and by my fellow students that physics is just information and special ways of thinking about the world, as such it is morally neutral, and that the question of “right vs. wrong” applies only to what others do with it. I heard many people say “I just do/teach physics – what other people do with it is not my responsibility”. This separation from moral responsibility is partly a response to Oppenheimer’s claim that “physicists have known sin” – the willing development by good-hearted physicists of nuclear weapons during WWII and afterwards (“Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect” by Charles Thorpe p.190). [Andy Johnson]
He changed his tack, however, after many years in the field. What he teaches, he says, has moral implications. He can teach his students, for example, to rely upon the authoritative teachings of physics, or he can teach them to be independent thinkers. He can encourage or discourage questioning.
With regard to what I teach, I cannot be a moral person if I act as if physics has nothing to contribute to the burning issues of the day such as climate change, resource depletion, population growth, and economic troubles – all of which have been shown to be symptoms of the fundamental long-term unsustainability of the capital-industrial system (e.g. see “The Limits to Growth” by Meadows, et. al). Physics has been a key enabler in allowing this system to lurch to where it is now, and it would be worse than folly to pretend that physics doesn’t provide critically useful perspectives in helping people understand the problems and begin addressing them.
On the other hand, cautioned another teacher, we have powerful positions as experts in a highly-regarded field. We don’t want to use our position of power and authority to “bully-pulpit,” especially about an issue so sensitive as population growth. Would we advocate that our students refrain from having children? Of course not, that’s the socioeconomic, political, and psychological ramifications of the scientific content. And, are physics teachers the best people to teach about such questions? If it includes physics — well, yes. We’re experts in that arena. We can teach about the energetics or chemistry of climate change, but the politics of it are beyond us.
The problem, of course, is that these lines blur. What we choose to teach is inherently political. And if we teach about exponential growth and make a connection between that mathematics and population growth, then we are engaging in mathematical modeling of a problem that is much too complex for the average physicist’s expertise to address.
What’s my own opinion? I think we should teach students some of the powerful scientific ideas that underlie the important issues of our time — exponential growth, conservation of energy, the greenhouse effect, and so forth. We should make the connection between the abstract physics and the real-world application. We should do our best to help our students understand the issue, from a scientific point of view. What we choose to teach shows our biases and preferences — we can’t escape that, and we’re fools if we think that we can. But students’ decisions, or those of policymakers, aren’t our arena.
Bacteria in a large bottle double in number every minute, through cell division.
At 11:00 there is one bacterium in the bottle. At 12:00 the bottle is completely full.
At what time is the bottle half full?
How long after 12:00 would it take to fill two bottles (assuming no bacteria are lost)?
Exponential Folding (one of my podcasts): How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half?
Use a large newspaper sheet and have folks fold it in two, repeatedly. It gets to be difficult pretty fast. So you can ask them to fold it as many times as they possibly can (like a game; who can fold more than 6x) You can ask them to predict how thick the folded 0.1mm sheet will be once you fold it 6 times (compare to 5x or 4x). Have your participants ‘guesstimate’ how thick the sheet would be if you could -hypothetically- fold it 50 times. Turns out that: (10^-4m) (2^50) is roughly 10^12 which is roughly the distance between the Sun & the Earth.
A few problem sets from Ed Redish’s collection: 1, 2, 3
And apparently Population Connection has a lot of free, good activities for a wide range of learners. They also do workshops for free! They are certainly liberal, but reportedly agenda-free.
And below a video from Al Bartlett, a physicist who has been giving a talk on population growth, exponential functions, and energy demands for the past 20 years. He gave me shivers when I heard him speak. He’s not snappy, but his points, and the math, is quite compelling.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Want a benchtop SEM scan of your fingernail? This is too cool — a company called ASPEX will take an SEM scan of any object that you send them and pst it online. You can certainly find some intriguing stuff lying around your home or office to scan and send to them! Or how about having your students send in a few interesting things? Here’s the link to past scans. They say:
You could send us a stray crumb from the bottom of your purse, a piece of lipstick, some leftover sushi…anything you’d like to see a picture of under a powerful microscope.
If you want to have something scanned, send in this form to ASPEX Corporation/ Free Sample Submissions/ 175 Sheffield Dr./ Delmont, PA 15626. The images and report will be posted on our website here in about two weeks. Samples won’t be returned!
Select a topic relevant to what is being learned in class, then track it to see what news stories or conversations are revolving around that topic. Another way to use the tracking method is to track a word or phrase to see how it is being used by others. This is a great way to learn the nuances of words and phrases.
They mention using Twitter for conferences, which is something that I do avidly (and really the only time that I use Twitter a lot), though I’m not completely clear on how that’s used in a classroom.
Whether professor or student, whether attending or having to stay behind, anyone interested in following the activities and thoughts going on at professional conferences can stay connected through Twitter. Conference attendees can also participate in BackChatter, a Twitter game that draws those attending a conference into becoming interactive participants.
Lastly, your school can win $3000 for creating an public service announcement about household pests. This is part of the National Pest Management Association’s non-profit activities. Below is information:
PestWorldForKids.org, an educational children’s Web site developed by the National Pest Management Association (NPMA), today announced a national competition for students (grades 4 through to win $3,000 for one lucky school’s science department. The contest challenges teachers and their students to create educational Public Service Announcements (PSAs) that highlight the health and property risks posed by household pests such as rodents, ants, termites, cockroaches, stinging insects and ticks.
“Insects are incredibly interesting and fun to learn about in the classroom,” says Missy Henriksen, vice president of public affairs for NPMA. “It’s when they come indoors – into our homes and schools – that they become pests. We are excited to offer students the chance to learn about pests, while at the same time using their creativity to explore an important educational topic.”
We invite students in grades 4 through 8 to use their biology and entomology knowledge, as well as their creativity, to create educational public service announcements (PSAs) that discuss the health and property risks posed by household pests. Additional information, including sample PSAs and lesson plans for creating PSAs, are available at www.PestWorldForKids.org.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
You can ask it at the following address, and get a customized reply from an expert in the field! Pretty cool service — I’ve served as an expert answerer at least once. If you’re a new teacher or an experienced one, it’s nice to have a go-to place for your burning questions. Besides, if you’re trying anything vaguely inquiry-oriented, you’ll find that you get questions you don’t know how to answer. What a great way to model the idea that you don’t have to know all the answers, you just have to know where to find out!
——————-
MAST WebConnect is FREE for teachers
Do you have questions about math and science content, lesson plans, teaching methods, state content standards, or help finding Internet resources?
What is MAST WebConnect?
WebConnect is a free service provided by the University of Northern Colorado. WebConnect replaces the popular MAST Hotline, a free call-in service established in 1989. We help you find expert reviewed answers to questions through WebConnect, a one-stop Web resource for teachers in mathematics and science.
How it works
The Internet provides a wealth of information, but sorting through and filtering that information to find quality materials can be an overwhelming task.
Contact WebConnect with any math or science question, and we will find the information by contacting experts in the field or finding high-quality Internet sites.
contact us: webconnect@unco.edu or 800-866-6278
Examples of Recent inquiries
“Can you suggest an Earth Day activity for high school students?”
“Does electricity flow from positive to negative or vice versa?”
“How can I incorporate the stock market into 9th grade math?”
“Do you have any web resources for teaching human anatomy?”
“What do snails eat?”
Inquiries can be simple or complex. More complex questions will be routed to expert scientists.
What does it cost?
MAST WebConnect is FREE!
How can I find WebConnect?
Visit our website at mast.unco.edu/webconnect
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
No, of course not. But to hear us education folks prattle on, you’d think that an instructor who lectures to their students is doing them a grave disservice.
Well, if all they’re doing is lecture, then their students could be getting more bang for their buck. But lecturing is perhaps an indispensable part of class, especially in large college courses. I’m reading a great article right now on how to make lectures more effective — here are some tidbits from that article (P.A. deWinstanley and R. A. Bjork, “Successful Lecturing: Presenting Information in Ways that Engage Effective Processing,” in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond).
Firstly, people need to be active in order to learn.
Toward achieving the goal of having students actually learn during lectures, it is important to remind ourselves of some fundamental properties of humans as learners. Learning does not happen, for example, through some kind of literal recording process. Rather, learning is an interpretive process: new information is stored by relating it to, or linking it up with, what is already known.
So, in lecture, we need to be able to spark the kinds of cognitive processes that actually help people learn. For one,students’ attentioncan’t be divided if they’re to fully process what we’re trying to teach. But Powerpoint and other tools require students to both attend to something visual (the screen) while they process something auditory (what we’re saying). The end result seems to be that students think they understand, but can’t actually recall the material on the test (Note the implications for students’ tendency to multitask during class!) That’s horrible — students leave with the impression that they don’t need to study because they know the material, but they really don’t.
It’s also important that students, once their attention is directed, have a chance to interpret and elaborate upon what is presented in lecture. New information has to be fit in with what a student already knows. A graph, for example, isn’t easily memorized. But once a student has determined what that visual information represents, and used it to answer a question, he will more likely recall the graphic or its message.
In order to remember information, it’s also important that students be given a chance to generate and retrieve that information. The act of recall strengthens neuronal connections, creating learning. That’s why it’s helpful to test oneself when studying for a test (and this is useful even if you aren’t given the answers about whether you’re right or not, though feedback is more helpful). Producing information helps us learn more than being presented with that information. Even something as simple as having to fill in missing blanks in a word (eg., “try to incorporate g-n-r-t-ng into your lecture”) results in better learning than reading that same word in bold (eg., “try to incorporate generating into your lecture.”) Of course, the use of personal response systems (“clickers”) fulfills this end very nicely.
A few presentation tips from the article:
Space repetitions of information across lectures. Long term recall is improved when information is spread out over time. That’s why it’s better to study over several days, rather than cram the night before the test.
Show key concepts in several different ways. This is termed “encoding variability,” and gives students a chance to learn the material in more than one way, which helps them generalize what they’ve learned.
Provide structure. This is the goal of the ubiquitous outline we see in talks, lectures, syllabi, etc. Some studies have found that students learn a lot from filling in an instructor-prepared outline of lecture notes (eg., headings and subheadings), rather than taking lecture notes on a blank piece of paper. Concept maps are also useful ways of helping students see the big picture.
Use visuals and mnemonics. This is another way of increasing encoding variability, or the different ways in which students process the information that’s being presented. Vivid examples and analogies can help, as can graphs, figures, or having students produce their own diagrams. Enthusiasm and humor, well-placed, can also serve as a mnemonic.
Ask students questions. Ask students questions in class, and require them to give the reasons behind their answers. Again, clicker questions are a great way to do this, and to make sure every student has a chance to explain their reasoning (at least to their peers). To get the real benefit here, the questions have to be genuine questions, not rhetorical. So many instructors ask a question, and then answer it themselves, lulling students into a certain passivity.
So, there are many ways to make lecture an extremely positive learning experience for our students. But simple enthusiasm and clear explanations aren’t enough.
(P.A. deWinstanley and R. A. Bjork, “Successful Lecturing: Presenting Information in Ways that Engage Effective Processing,” in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond).
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I’m in a scientific visualization seminar now, so I’ll probably be sharing some beautiful things with some regularity.
There is something very satisfying about complex geometrical objects. I think my brain feels this sigh of relief at such orderly intricacies. So, I love these images created by computer algorithm, basically tweaking parameters to get surprising forms generated from simple polygons. The details of how they do it was lost on me — lots of mathematical and computer jargon — but the output is beautiful. From what I understand, they take a platonic solid and then use some process to systematically modify certain parameters, like curvature and branching. Below is an example of the output.
Earlier this year NPR ran a narrated slideshow of the most spectacular images from the Hubble, with commentary from astronomers on why that particular image made them sit up and say wow. Now, Hubble is back in action and just yesterday NASA released some new images. They’re pretty, but astronomy has never been my forte, so I don’t have anything intelligent to say about them!
And on the social science side — here’s a site — Sociological Images — that’s not so much about how pretty things are, but how images affect us socially and psychologically, or what they mean about our culture. Very interestingly written. A cool guest post today talks about the Don’t Mess with Texas littering campaign, and why it was successful where others failed.
For those who get off on graphs and data (I know you’re out there) — check out Chart Porn. Here’s one beautiful one that they reposted from Information is Beautiful which plots caffeine vs. calories of many of the things we toss into our bodies.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I am a physicist, writer, podcaster, and educator in Boulder, CO. On this blog I get to wax on about science stuff I think is cool (like weird science, or stuff we think is true but isn't), K-16 science education, hands-on science activities, teaching pedagogy, and how to communicate science. Geek on. 8-)
to win $3,000 for one lucky school’s science department. The contest challenges teachers and their students to create educational Public Service Announcements (PSAs) that highlight the health and property risks posed by household pests such as rodents, ants, termites, cockroaches, stinging insects and ticks.
’)
