The hybrid fall 2020 term wrapped up with four residential laboratories. This term holidays on Monday and Wednesday pushed the introduction of Ohm's law and the relationship of power to voltage and current to the front 30 minutes of the residential lab session.
Belsin and Pendura work on verifying Ohms law.
Hart, MJ, use the other set up in the laboratory to verify Ohms law.
MJ plots data in Desmos on his tablet. The number of batteries is increased to push up the voltage and current for a fixed resistance set on the resistance box.
The equipment is downright ancient but I like the physically moving needles. They are less of a digital black box that a modern multimeter would be. There is something almost visceral about seeing the needle move, watching the needle waver ever so slightly as the current varies.
Data at one point was being reflected on the board.
Loyida, Rhea, and Semihma add a battery to their circuit. By this point in the term the single female student in the 8:00 section was no longer submitting work nor attending the lab section. In the 11:00 section the single male student, who had a track record of always being late or absent, was often now absent. This made the 8:00 section all male, and the 11:00 section all female. In physical science laboratories out here there is a tendency of the men to handle the equipment, one I usually have to point out to the students to get them to realize, to see, what is happening. The women tend to give way to the men around equipment. The students often catch themselves when I point this out and they rebalance themselves. This term that was not necessary, the sections were accidentally an all male section and an all female section. Which perhaps provided the women with more time on equipment than if men were present. In cultures where there remain gender based roles, I can personally see the positive impact of an all female section around the sort of equipment that is used in a physical science class.
Not a selfie, Semihma is entering data.
Data on the board at the end of the 11:00 section
Detail of the data for laboratory twelve on Ohm's law.
Laboratory thirteen was floral litmus solutions. For a second term, with fall 2019 being the last time the lab was run, I ran the tables in a manner that made the board match if read from left to right. For years I boiled water on the south table and put the unknowns on the north table. The board is on the west wall, so to match the directions to the table order, the directions had to be read from right to left. This actually confused some students. So I put the directions in order from left to right, and boiled water on the south table, unknowns on the north s
Part III happened on the north lab table.
Few images were captured during laboratory thirteen, this was during the clean-up.
Hart, Marlin
Laboratory fourteen was the laboratory practical examination and effectively the final examination for the course. The course is centered on the laboratories and always has been. Science as what we can observe, what we can measure, what we can model mathematically. Not as memorized facts. I see the problem with science elsewhere as a subject taught as memorized facts. Well one set of memorized information is no more real than another set of memorized information. Memorized facts asks the students to accept those facts based on faith. And therein lies the rub. Once something is accepted on faith and asserted as being scientifically true, flat earthers result. Science becomes a matter of what you believe. A from there you wind up with a nation that cannot respond appropriately to a pandemic. Science is not a belief system. Science is not a pile of facts to be learned. Science is a process, a way of investigating the world and, in physical science, reaching mathematically based understandings of that world.
Belsin, Pendur, MJ, Jaylino
Laboratory 14 gave the students a system they had not previously worked with. Two questions were asked. Does the length of the pendulum affect the period? Does the weight affect the period?
Hart, Marlin
The students had no further directions that the two questions, although I did demonstrate the period of the pendulum.
The pendulums were hung from the center rail.
JacyAnn, Rhea, Semihma, Rojane
JacyAnn, Rhea, Semihma. Rojane changing the weights.
Board diagrams
The afternoon session had more difficulty understanding how to sort out the two variables, using a variety of weights on a variety of lengths.
Hart
Laboratory 15 opened with my showing the class The Code using ChromeCast. Unfortunately this proved problematic as the ChromeCast announced that it was casting to every Android device on the college's national campus network. Students elsewhere attempted to cast SoundCloud and YouTube, along with changing the volume. Remotely. From anywhere on campus. Not their fault: most of them had no idea what the message said. I would later learn that there is no solution to this problem. The only solution is to put the ChromeCast on a completely different network.
I then put up the site swap diagrams as I have done in recent terms: unobfuscated. The students correctly predicted the next color. I showed them how number arise from the abstract patterns. I pointed out that they could now pass a quiz or test on site swap patterns. I also noted that they had no idea what use the patterns were to them in their lives. Just like quadratic equations. A set of symbols they could abstractly work with to obtain "solutions", but which had no other meaning for them. I did ask if anyone knew what those abstract patterns meant, and of course Marlin did, but he also realized that I knew he knew and that he did not need to say so. He had insider information of course.
Marlin demonstrates a magician's dexterity
Marlin juggling
This brought the first hybrid term to a close. I lingered for a while in the classroom, feeling a wistful sense of loss. I watched a few Palikir elementary school students walk past on their way to their homes, chattering away in Pohnpeian. The hybrid class had felt the most connected, a chance to feel somewhat less socially isolated in a time of social isolation. Although the nation remains in a pandemic virus free bubble, the college chose, out of an abundance of caution, to go online and remain online rather than risk the destabilization of having to move online partway through the term if the coronavirus status of the state changed.
I think more than anything the term convinced me that the importance of an education is in the interactions between people working together. In some of the in major, content specific courses, the content is indeed paramount. But in a general education non-major course, the content is, dare I say, meaningless. An accountant is not going to use physical science content knowledge in their day to day work life. Ever. I think that the processes I teach, the skills in gathering data, analyzing that data, and reporting the results are important for accountants, computer information systems, and Micronesian studies majors among others. But what students report remembering to me later is not the content nor the process, but that I encouraged them, helped them, believed in them. That is what they connected to. The personal relationship that made them feel they could succeed. And online classes do not generate that same personal connection.
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