11-12-16 Energy & Systems

Greetings! The topics of energy and momentum are central to our subject matter and many of us have taught them for a long time. Like everything we teach it is good to reflect on best practices, how we have been doing things, how our students conceive, both correctly and incorrectly about what we are helping them to understand, and also share with each other what we do and have found to work well and not so well.

“Systems” thinking is an integral part of understanding conservation and how it is applied to problem solving in energy and momentum. This November 12th we will look at student difficulties in this area and discuss practices and methods to best engage students in learning about systems, energy, and momentum. To frame up the discussion I am providing a link to a folder containing six articles related to this topic for our meeting. I hope that pre-reading these articles will help lead to fruitful and engaging discussion and in meeting collaboration. Here is the link <https://goo.gl/26U039>.

Professor Ken Heller from the University of Minnesota will join us to share his insights into these

topics as well. Ken brings a lot from his depth of knowledge with the subject matter and his perspective from physics education research. Thank you Ken!

After discussion we hope to collaborate in meeting on a shared Google document or two containing problem scenarios, video learning, lab experiences etc. that are directed toward explicitly teaching systems thinking in energy and momentum. If you have items to share please bring them or upload them to the above link. I look forward to learning together.

The start of a worksheet for us to group edit on a Systems Approach to Energy. <<-- Link.