Monthly Archives: October 2013

Day 31: Electronics project

Posted on October 22, 2013 by John Burk

A student sent me the following idea out of the blue today: I’m not sure what has caused this shift, but we’ve definitely got a core of students who are increasingly interested in computer programming and electronics hacking. It’s awesome … Continue reading →

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Day 34: Successful post-its

Posted on October 16, 2013 by John Burk

I’ve managed to successfully print on post-it notes using our laser printer, and it works incredibly well. Here’s my latest formative assessment tool. Students put their posit on the color corresponding to their level of understanding on their way out … Continue reading →

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Day 33: Honey!

Posted on October 16, 2013 by John Burk

Some friends invited us over to their farm this weekend to help make honey, and I never knew a centrifuge was part of the process. Once you cut off the top of the honeycomb, you extract all the honey by … Continue reading →

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Day 32: Heat transfer experiment

Posted on October 16, 2013 by John Burk

I’m learning that heat transfer experiments are hard to do. Here’s one we created that is marginally successful. We placed two aluminum rods of the same length and different thincknesses between an ice bath and a hot water bath. We … Continue reading →

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Day 30: Comment Follow up

Posted on October 15, 2013 by John Burk

I often wonder if writing close to 400 words per student in a comment has any use at all. This year, I decided to check into this, so I created a quick text-expander snippet to allow me to fairly quickly … Continue reading →

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Day 29: Parallel and Normal Force

Posted on October 15, 2013 by John Burk

We got out the 2 axis force plate to take on this free body diagram: Many students wanted to say that the normal force was equal to the gravitational force. It was pretty easy to put a bloc loaded with … Continue reading →

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Day 28: the power of the sun

Posted on October 11, 2013 by John Burk

One of the next units we are going to work on in Intro Physics will be radiation and convection. For a demo/experiment, we took a large parabolic mirror our to measure by how much we can increase the temperature of … Continue reading →

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Day 27: Comments and Recs

Posted on October 11, 2013 by John Burk

I’ve been writing comments and college recommendations for most of the weekend. I wrote 19,803 words for 50 students, clocking me in at almost 400 words per kid. It was grueling and completely exhausting, but I think a few of … Continue reading →

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Day 26: A new sciecne building

Posted on October 11, 2013 by John Burk

I attended the STEM Symposium at the University of Delaware to commemorate the opening of their new Integrated Sciences Lab. The symposium was fantastic, and it featured a particularly excellent talk on developing persistence in science students and attracting more … Continue reading →

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Day 25: Splitting wood

Posted on October 10, 2013 by John Burk

As part of our guys group, we spent the evening learning how to split firewood. In addition to a great moment for talking about manliness, we learned a few lessons in physics as well. I was surprised by just how … Continue reading →

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