Science Methods II - Week 5

 

Lab: In Lab this week we began by discussing our homework from last week. We talked about pieces that were meaningful to us and the core ideas that our list reveals about the article. Then we talked about why we think that we need to push someone on a swing to keep them going, and why they won’t stay moving forever. We brought this into a pendulum situation and played with the friction slider, I was able to see that the pendulum slowed down faster when there was more air friction. This showed me that it was friction in the air that causes pendulums to eventually come to a stop. We then talked about this from an energy lens, and I learned that the pendulum collides with air particles, so the air friction is actually the pendulum transferring kinetic energy into the air particles. Then we moved to talking about our unit as a whole. Particularly we talked about what lenses we can use to talk about different settings and supporting play for them that is exciting, while remaining safe. We then talked about the engineering process and used it to talk about how we can design a playground surface. We then learned about the scamper method, and worked in our groups to create a surface that would prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from 1 meter. We then talked about why our design worked using the force and energy lenses. We then talked about Newton’s third law, and how objects exert equal and opposite forces on each other when colliding. Afterwards, we predicted what would happen if we weighed a wooden block and a cup of water separately, and how the weight would change if we weighed them with the wooden block inside the cup of water instead. Next we talked about how energy can manifest in many ways, can be transferred from one system to another, and is never created or destroyed. We watched a video, and used an energy lens to talk about why the ball didn’t bounce. We then discussed, using the energy lens, why an egg bounces in one example, and doesn’t bounce in another. Finally, we talked about how students should use force and energy ideas through NGSS examples, and our key takeaways from the physics module.

Lecture: In Lecture today we just took our Physics exam.

Reading: There was no textbook reading for this week.