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Author Archives: John Burk
Day 25: Testing out the high speed camera on the iPhone6
Seems like the new iPhone6 camera is going to be pretty great for physics class. Special bonus: Two students from honors physics last year dropped by class and jumped right into lab work. It was great to see how quickly … Continue reading
Day 22: Circuit puzzles
In Intro Physics we’ve started working on circuits using a modified version of the CASTLE materials and students encountered a question about which bulb in a two bulbs in series circuit would light first. This led to a lot of … Continue reading
Day 23: Recommendations & proofreading help
For the past week or so it’s been rec time all the time. I ended up with 14 college recs and our school has an internal deadline where they are all due early in the year. I thought I might … Continue reading
Day 21: Gist, Slack and coding roulette
In Computer Science 3, we’ve been truing to find an authentic way to get students to better understand the value of good coding habits, like carefully naming their functions, and including comments. So my co-teacher and I decided to try … Continue reading
Day 20: Scratch vs. Python
I’m borrowing a lot of ideas from Dan Anderson’s Computer Science course, and one of the things I really like about his approach is how he’s introducing students to a number of different languages, and through this, helping students to … Continue reading
Day 19: Ta-Nehisi Coates Rocks Our World
Today, along with 8 other faculty, I took this bus full of kids to see Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the must read article of the summer: The Case for Reparations. The talk was amazing. Coates even made time to speak … Continue reading
Day 18: Free Body Diagram Gallery Walk
In the past, BFPM has been a bit of a morass for us—we’ve sometimes spent 4 weeks on all the stuff in this unit. This year, our goal is to clear it in less than 3 weeks, and hopefully closer … Continue reading
Day 15: A great experiment from Josh Gates
Josh Gates has a great experiment for a Newton’s 2nd law lab using an atwood machine (here’s a related post he wrote about a similar lab with a half atwood). We decided to incorporate this experiment into a group paradigm … Continue reading
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Day 17: Best class ever
I wrote about it a ton on my main blog, but today was a pretty special day in my honors physics class. My students blew me away with their ability to run a physics discussion and think deeply about some … Continue reading
Day 16: Agreeing on FBDs
This has never happened before, but when working on Matt Greenwolfe’s box pushing activity, students started drawing Free Body Diagrams and then they just got into a spontaneous conversation about the best way to represent forces in the diagram (I … Continue reading
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