Posts

My Lovely Sha Sha, latitude, and longitude

Image
This term Binky was replaced by My Lovely Sha Sha  My Lovely Sha Sha  Complete with a name tag The string proved very useful for securing Sha Sha to a branch Location of Sha Sha to the west of the student center Tied to a Campnosperma brevipetiolata branch Obscured from some angles Non-obvious even from close range. Class opened with a slide deck on setting up GPSTest for Android. The deck also mentions iOS Compass and iOS GPS Tracks . Scrap paper was provided so students could reference the coordinates as they walked. iPhone compass doesn't display decimal places for the seconds. Of 14 students 12 students had iPhones. Compass doesn't display decimal places for arcseconds. Note that one iPhone had a Compass app that looked different and displayed decimal degrees. The phone appeared to be an older phone. One student found that GPS Tracks would report two decimal places ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Temperature and cooling curves

Image
Started off the week with Eureka! Unit three: Heat and temperature .  Watching Eureka on the Smartboard. The laboratory was preset in the morning ahead of class in order to secure a water supply. Pot was set to preboil. After the video, 100 Celsius and 0 Celsius were demonstrated in class. The morning session wrapped with an overview of temperatures in Celsius Cooling curve laboratory was on an 11:45 start
Post a Comment
Read more

Force of friction

Image
The morning session was Newton's laws of motion supported by a slide deck. With 17 students and a shortage of weights, students were given only one 500 gram mass, a single 200 gram mass, a 100 gram mass, and a 50 gram mass. This proved sufficient to generate weight data. This term no scales were brought. As a result, the sleds were not massed. This just meant that the data has a y-intercept at roughly the mass of the sled.  This approach, rather accidentally stumbled into when the digital scales were forgotten, worked better than expected. There has always been the complication of adding in the base weight of the sled to the numbers on the slot weights. This added enough of a layer of confusion as to cause errors and slow down the measurement process. Students became fixated on re-weighing the sled and masses each time they added a mass. Letting the mass of sled be unknown leads to obtaining the estimated mass of the sled at the y-intercept divided by the slope.  ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum and energy

Image
With a heavy head cold draining energy, the silent opening was easy to maintain. Once the diagrams were up on the board, a brief description of the exploration was given. The right side was after what was a good 20 minutes of exploration, perhaps more.  Seniko and Ellinae explore conservation of momentum  Ellinae test rolling a line of four marbles into three marbles. Harston and Austin exploring momentum  Iva Faye records data while Leila'Ona watches. Maylanica is setting up to time a run from around 5 or 8 cm up the ramp. Heights were the Fibonacci sequence from 5 cm and up. Based on the Hot Wheels cars and track producing very linear data, this term saw a return to banana leaf marble ramps. The leaves were gathered in the morning. The absence of carpenter ants, a recent development, and of scale insects, made cutting and carrying a much more pleasant activity. And the leaves are healthier and stron...
Post a Comment
Read more

Acceleration

Image
The morning opened with a review of laboratory two velocity. An introduction to acceleration as a change in velocity. A request to sketch the shape acceleration will produce on a time versus distance graph. Only one curve. Ten linear lines. Desmos The morning acceleration from zero produced an acceleration of 0.24 meters per second - half of the values seen historically, but this is due primarily to the new start at the LRC which allows a more leisurely acceleration and a longer duration of acceleration. I had forgotten that I setup calculation of the velocity in Desmos, so the orange line was not there during class.  The above was what was shown to the class.  Desmos High speed swizzling is not possible with a groin strain. And the wobbly turn around was also hard with my muscular issues. Old age coupled with an unwillingness to let the muscles recover with reinjury. This run should not have been done. A timing mark was completely missed and the inboun...
Post a Comment
Read more