AAPT Southern California Section
Matthew D’Alessio, Loraine Lundquist (CSUN) – Water-Powered Rockets with collaborative, computer-supported approach.
Each year, our physical science class for pre-service elementary teachers launches water-powered rockets based on the activity from NASA. We adopted this classic activity to use a collaborative, computer-supported approach using simple and easily-available functions in Google Spreadsheets to pool observations, provide instant feedback, and publicly display results from all teams side-by-side in real-time. These instant comparisons promote student accountability and engagement, inspiring them to think more carefully about why answers may be different and notice sloppy data or unlikely outcomes -- in short, to facilitate and motivate expert thinking about data.
Norm Herr & Brian Foley (CSUN) The use of collaborative web-based documents to create scientific research communities in physics classrooms.
New collaborative web-based document technology provides students and teachers the opportunity to readily collect and analyze large sets of data from multiple lab groups and class sections. Such resources may be used to create an environment that more closely resembles the collaborative environment of a professional scientific community in which researchers develop hypothesis and explanations in light of their own findings and those of their colleagues.
Introduction to CSCS (Brian)
Introduction to CSCS
Invitation to Open House.
Examples from this last week (Norm)
Determining the wavelength of light
Determining osmotic pressure (Example of teacher work: Marschall Fazio)