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Showing posts from January, 2012

Acceleration

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This term laboratory one was not returned until Wednesday, which increased the time on Monday to obtain acceleration of a RipStik. I changed the procedure this term, using a tape measure to measure off  800 centimeters. Initially I tried distances that increased, but this did not work out well. I then used 200 centimeter segments marked with chalk. A student timed my crossings of the 200 centimeters marks. This worked out rather well and generated a nice curve with an increasing velocity. Ceyleen and Kimberly Wednesday I handed back laboratories and covered them in some detail for the first 30 minutes of class. I realized that I need to spend more time clarifying what I want in the laboratories, and I did so this term. I then worked the homework - the velocity between 200 cm and 400 cm, and 400 cm to 600 cm from the Monday RipStik acceleration exercise. This left too little time to have the students trace ball arcs on the board, so I ran that as a demonstration on Wednesday.

Rolling balls and linear relationships

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Spring 2012 laboratory 022 marked the fourth term of the even "no write up" laboratories. Assessment done spring 2011 indicated that the shift from writing up every laboratory to writing up only odd laboratories did not have a negative impact on the improvement in writing. In laboratory 022 the location of the ball at each second is marked by a different student. Then the distance to the timing mark is determined. This makes the time the independent variable and the distance the dependent variable. As this laboratory is often done in physics, the distance is preset and becomes the independent variable, with a timing determining the time to that fixed distance - such as a photogate on a air track. The ramp permits rolling the ball at a specific velocity that can be repeated. This allows the timing markers to stand near to the correct location for their particular number of seconds. Only a single timer is actually needed, one student calls out the seconds while watching

Social media survey

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A convenience sample survey of 73 students in the MS 150 Statistics class at the College of Micronesia-FSM Palikir national campus 09 January 2012 asked about social media membership. Site Sp 09 Fa 09 Sp 10 Fa 10 Sp 11 Fa 11 Sp 12 FaceBook 0 9 12 46 62 54 70 Twitter NA NA NA NA NA NA 7 MySpace 32 45 33 33 45 29 31 Bebo 17 41 27 37 42 20 19 Other 8 16 26 25 16 12 10 None 9 13 10 8 8 4 3 Sample size n 54 74 58 66 72 61 73 Number of students with membership in the listed site by term Note that the columns do not add to the sample size as students can have multiple memberships. Percentage of students with membership in the listed site by term  FaceBook continued to extend its dominant posi