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Force of friction

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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.  ...
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Momentum and energy

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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...
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Acceleration

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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...
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Using NotebookLM AI as an editor in physical science class

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I do not use AI detection systems in SC 130 Physical Science for laboratory report submissions as I have reasons to doubt their accuracy. AI is evolving too quickly for detection systems to keep up. In addition, false positives are deeply damaging to the instructor-student relationship. False positives are undoubtedly very rare, but anecdotal evidence suggests that false positives disproportionately affect the most academically capable students.   The course syllabus does not currently include a statement on the use of AI because as an instructor I am still working to understand what a functional AI policy will look like. I can only encourage the students to write reports in their own words. My intent is to help them improve their own writing skills, not the writing skills of an AI.  Sometimes I can sense that AI has been used - AI tends to use vocabulary and idioms found in formal scientific writing and technical publications. That is what the AI is trained on, but my st...
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Velocity

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Day three is week two in summer session physical science. And week two is velocity. After a note on screen capturing graphs to not cut off the bottom of the graph, the students were orally asked what a time versus distance graph would look like for an object moving at an unchanging speed.  Then the class adjourned to the sidewalk where a 30 meter RipStik run was done.  The newer stopwatch with timing to a thousandth of a second was used. That third decimal place is actually quite meaningless.  This term marked a return to the sidewalk on a sunny day. Spring term the class used the vacant student center building. Prior to going to the sidewalk the students were asked to sketch what would be the result on the time versus distance graph for three ball speeds. About half of the students made a correct sketch. The most common misconception was a single line where different segments of the line corresponded to different speeds.  The ball...
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