Week 11 Agenda and Assessment 3 Overview

Below you can find a link to the Week 11 Agenda. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post. 

Week 11 Agenda

Also, as a general resource, this is what my preliminary plan for this whole assessment will look like. (Things will certainly change as I see what my students need extra support with, but I find it really helpful to have a very general idea of how I might want to approach the whole task.)

Assessment Overview

Week 9 Reflection (And Examples for Assessment 2 Part 3)

Week 9 concluded the investigation of how balanced forces don't change motion, how unbalanced forces do change motion, and how a change in motion depends on the mass of the objects.

My students had a ton of different ways to investigate this, some of the ideas that generated the best data are described below:

Tug-of-war: This was a popular one as a lot figured out that they could easily combine balanced, unbalanced, and mass together (they generally went with the reasonable assumption for 8th graders that more mass generally equaled more ability to pull). Most measured whether they were able to pull the other side, others looked at how long it took to shift to the direction with more mass.

Bottles and Ramps: A number of students filled water bottles with different amounts of water, they looked at how long it took different masses of water to go down ramps of different heights. Some of the conclusions, such as balanced need to be more inferred, but there were a lot of variables that they students easily changed. (Other students looked at toy cars with different masses for this.)

Toy Cars: There were a lot of ideas with toy cars, but one of the most successful looked at crashing together cars of different or the same mass together and seeing the bounce back. 

Balloon Powered Car: Some students experimented with the cars, I didn't make this a requirement, but students tried things like adding balloons pointing opposite directions and blowing the balloons up different amounts to change balanced and unbalanced forces. Weights were also added to the cars to change mass.

Those were just a few of many different set ups. There were others that were super creative, but didn't quite reach all the targets to investigation. While I approved all the plans before they started, I really didn't want to stop students from investigating something in a creative way just because the data wouldn't be perfect.

This week we also moved on to part 4, the bumper. Only some of my students are at this step, others are still working on their slides (revising) or their write up from the investigation. To save time, and because I only have so many planks of wood, I provided a set up to test the impact. The students did have the options to try something different, but this set up worked for most.

There was a ramp for the car to go down and a short distance away a book for the car to collide to, depending on the car the height of the book might have changed.

 

The students measured how far a penny moved after colliding with the book, for some the penny shot off of their car, for others they measured the distance it moved on the car itself. Their challenge was to reduce significantly the amount it moved, with a goal of zero. Given that the amount of movement depended a lot on how good their car was, I didn't have a specific requirement as that would put more difficulty on those who had better cars.

Stayed on the car, so distance measured on car

Other pennies flew off of the car

Others hit with too much force that they began to go over the book, this one would probably retest with a stack of two books to prevent this

All in all the assessment is going well. I think my students really will benefit from some more structured in their seat activities as there has been a lot of collaborative work recently. Collaborative work is never a bad thing, but a mix of activities can be good. Next week we will be working on some more structured group activities, partly to not introduce the new task in the two days before break, but also because I think they need the mix.

Week 10 Agenda

Below you can find a link to the Week 10 Agenda. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post. 

Week 10 Agenda

Week 8 Reflection

Two big successes this week were the phenomena posters and the increased rate of students turning in their parts of the assessment in a timely manner.

With the phenomena posters this was our first time returning to the phenomena that started off our assessment, we will return to it again. We started this task before break, but the final products were not done until this week. I had the groups present the posters to the class, which provided an easy basic assessment of understanding. There were certainly a lot of groups who still need more support in understanding the phenomena, but also a lot of students showing good understanding and an improvement from when we first discussed the phenomena at the start of the assessment.

When we return to it at the end I think it will be more structured, something along the line of: Explain how gravity impacts its motion. Explain how friction impacts its motion. Explain how centripetal force impacts its motion. Explain how speed impacts its motion. That way they have more guidelines about how to explain the physics involved.









The second success this week was improved student turn in rate for each part of the assessment. With the first assessment (the research paper) it often felt like a chore trying to get the students to finish the earlier parts of the assessment. In this assessment it hasn't been as much of a problem. I think there are a few things that helped. First off, the structure of the assessment was more engaging to more students than the paper. Second, there was more familiarity with how the assessment process was structured. Third, I more heavily pushed turn in dates, for example the slides were due the day before break, but the students were told they had more time if needed. While I said things should be done by certain points in the previous assessment, this was not pushed as strongly. 

This week also began the start of the part of the assessment that worried me the most, the investigation into how balance, unbalanced forces and mass impacted motion. I wasn't sure my students would know how to approach this investigation. I should have had more confidence in them as there were a lot of great ideas. Some groups needed support in deciding an idea, others had ideas I knew wouldn't work, but there were a lot of unique investigations. Since teacher approval was required to test I helped give some guidance to the first two types of groups and let the rest move on. I know some of the data will be iffy, but I would much rather have the students develop their own investigation and get ok data, than follow a prescribed plan. 

Looking at balanced forces with two ballons.

Looking at mass by pushing different sized stuffed animals with the same force and tracking the distance they moved.

Investigating both mass and unbalanced forces by analyzing the movement of different massed cars moving down different ramps.

Going back to the balloon powered race car to look at how balanced forces impact motion.

One of a few different set ups where they were looking at the force applied by the balloon, in this case they were representing friction with the blocks at the end.

The start to a larger investigation looking at friction between different surfaces,

I will post after I grade this assignment with a list of some of the student investigation approaches that worked well.

Week 9 Agenda

Below you can find a link to the Week 9 Agenda. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post. 

Week 9 Agenda

Unit 1 Assessment 1 Research Paper Topics

Looking back at the first assessment for this unit, I wanted to note some of the variety of topics I got from my students. I was generally happy with the range of questions because the variety of topics for the paper itself ultimately cover topics from our whole year of standards.

Note: Not all are well written questions, these just just my quick notes as I went around to approve questions/topics so in some cases I greatly simplified the question to note the topic. For some others where the students picked more closed type questions I discussed with the student what they would need to investigate beyond the initial question to make the question rigorous enough. The questions also reflect student ability, my desire was for all students to be able to tackle this assessment, at least through the research and thinking maps. Questions like, “What is a meteor?” would be appropriate for some of my students, but too straight forwards for others.

Asteroids Details:

What causes an asteroids to burn up before it reaches the surface?

What are asteroids?

Examples of asteroids that threaten us?

How do we classify asteroids?

Where did the debris that formed asteroids come from?

Difference between an asteroid and a meteor?

What benefits and nonbenefits do asteroids give us?

How do asteroids come into the solar system?

Difference between an asteroids and a comet?

What are asteroids made of?

What is a meteor?

How often do asteroids hit the moon and what is the effect?

How to they enter Earth’s gravitational pull?

Asteroid Speculation:

How to prevent future asteroids?

Would humans go extinct from an asteroid?

What would happen to asteroids if Jupiter disappeared?

The possibility of life on asteroids?

Where did Earth’s moon come from?

What size asteroid would be required to move the moon?

Difference between an ocean vs a land impact?

Can we use technology to change their course?

Asteroid Collisions:

What other natural disasters could asteroids cause?

What causes asteroids to hit us?

How destructive can an asteroid be?

How size impacts devastation?

How powerful is the shockwave of an asteroid impact?

Long term impact effect after a meteor hits?

Tunguska event?

Extinction:

How would the Earth be different if nothing ever threatened its existence?

What will most likely cause human extinction?

What other things cause extinctions?

What caused the 95% extinction in the Permian?

How were mammals able to survive the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs:

Would we have still evolved into humans without dinosaurs dying?

What habitats could support dinosaurs today?

How would knowledge of asteroids lead to understanding of how dinosaurs became extinct?

Do any animals related to dinosaurs live today?

Evidence for dinosaur die out?

How did the dinosaurs go extinct?

How did the food chain play a role in the extinction of the dinosaurs?

How did we find the dinosaur crater?

Fossils:

How can fossils be made?

How do rock layers form?

How do you age fossils?

How to identify the type of organism from the fossil?

Earth History:

Type of organism that made breathable air?

What changed in the cenozoic era?

Why is the fossil record incomplete?

How did plants first move to land?

Week 8 Agenda

Below you can find a link to the Week 8 Agenda. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post.

Week 8 Agenda

Week 7 Reflection

This week marked the start of the second part of the second assessment for NGSS focused on Newton's Laws and Engineering. This part of the task, unlike the first part (building the car), was an independent project and relies a lot more on student understanding. As such I expect there will be students who will need support completing the assignment. this was also somewhat of an odd week because it was conference week (meaning minimum days) and right before Thanksgiving break (so I stretched out the week a bit more than I might have otherwise).

The assignment had these students working on slides about Newton's laws and about how each law related to the motion of the balloon powered race car (student slides and teacher slides). The first part (describing the laws) isn't really critical to the task itself, but I felt like it supported the students in completing the second part (discussing how they related). And for the students who will need extra help it gives me something to start with when supporting them.

We worked on a law each day, which went well. I am used to spending a lot longer with direct instruction and student activities related to each law, so this shorter structure was a challenge for me. There is the constant worry that of how much I should be putting on the students in terms of understanding and how much I need to present to them. But. I look at this year as very much a work in progress. 

This week I begin each day with a demo or two related to the law. The first day we looked at a couple related to inertial. One is below, the other was the pulling out the table cloth from under a place setting trick.


(Embedding videos is having some issues right now, so I've added links below.)

(Video link)

The second day I didn't do a specific demo, other than discuss how it is easy to start pushing something that weigh less (like a pencil case) rather than something that weights more (like the lab table).

And the third day we looked equal an opposite forces with two rolling chairs and the students pushing off of each other and then just one student pushing. In both cases they both moved back.

Working on just one law each day gave the students a good amount of time to get the slides done in class and ask for support as needed. Since we have basically moved away from intentional homework the work time has become something the students expect and most use it well.

On Thursday we self checked the slides. Since it is hard for me to really work and check on each student each day, this gives them a chance to make sure they have the key parts before turning it in. 

And then we moved onto a couple more complicated demos. I feel like it is important to bring some of these more surprising and complicated demos into middle school science. Although not all students understand it 100%, it is good for them to be exposed to them. One isn't shown below, but it is where you have a platform suspended by strings with a pyramid of cups of water on it (it works 100% like swinging around a bucket of water, but looks way cooler). 

The first is the fan cart, which is fairly straight forward.

(Video link)

(Video link)

And the second is the bicycle gyroscope. This one is much more complicated, but I try to really present the idea of precision with just the idea of the first law and objects (or points on the object, wanting to keep moving how they were moving). 

In each case I tried to model how they might represent the forces acting on the object because that is a critical thing for them to become accustom to this unit. 

With this assessment I am also working on incorporating phenomena into this assessment. We looked at the wall of death at the start and I felt like a midway through check in would be good. With the short day the groups didn't all finish, so we will continue after break, but they began work on a group advertisement for the wall and the physics behind it. There were a lot of good ideas, but it was clear that a lot of groups either didn't get all the concepts at work (not surprising because it is a little complicated). This time I let them research online, which can be good or bad because you end up with some groups trying to explain a concept they don't yet understand rather than focusing on explaining what they do understand. We will return to their advertisements and a description of the physics behind it at the end of the unit as well. 

Although the final product can be more clunky than something done independently on the iPad, I feel like the collaboration aspect of making a poster with your group using pen and paper makes the activity more effective. 

Week 7 Agenda

Below you can find a link to the Week 7 Agenda. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post.

Week 7 Agenda

Week 6 Reflection

As what feels like of the few science teachers in our district who doesn't teach some sort of STEAM elective class, the whole Engineering Design Process was new to me. Don't get me wrong, I know I've unintentionally used those steps myself when working on projects, but I've never organized my class projects that way. Ultimately there were a number of unknowns going into this for me and a little bit of fear.

Would my students succeed?
How much support should I give them?
What if the teams were not working well together?
What would ultimately happen on competition day?

Thankfully, it all went fine and almost all my groups were successful for the competition day, those that were not may need some more support from me next week as we begin to move onto the next part of the assessment.

Just as an example this is what I provided my students (to note I have 7 classes for a total of 244 students, they worked mostly in groups of 4, so there were about 60 groups)
- Glue guns (we had 3)
- 200 glue gun sticks (almost enough, we ran out on competition day, but repairs could be done with tape)
- Tape (masking and scotch)
- White glue
- 1000 craft sticks (we were out of these by the end of the first day, we could have used a ton more)
- Balloons (2 provided by me per group, though I had extras for the competition in case they needed it)
- Straws (In a variety of sizes, around 1000)

Students also brought in a bunch of stuff on their own to work with, bottle caps, cardboard, old CDs, wooden skewers, and more. Although I provided a lot, something for the axles and wheels would have been necessary for the groups to bring. I do actually have skewers for the axles, but only provided these to groups who were nearing the competition and still at a loss of what to use.

A few of the final cars, I gave extra credit for artistic merit for students who choose to decorate their cars.

We had our actual competition on Thursday, which meant the students had two days for the initial planning and five days for building, this was more than most groups needed, but with the timing I thought it made more sense to draw out the activity than to introduce something new right before the weekend.

For the competition the students took turns having their cars travel along the classroom floor, my classroom is rather long (48 feet for the competition area) so it worked to test in there. If I didn't have that space I probably would have tested in the MPR. 

The students had the requirement of having their car travel at least 5 feet, it was a good metric of determining if the car actually moved or not. 

Just a few of the cars competing.

I did allow a sympathy nudge for the cars that needed a little push to get started (these were cars that were fighting for the 5 feet, not for winning furthest distance). 

For the students whose cars didn't work, they will continue working (with my help if needed) and we will be testing next week (aiming for the five feet). This is the first part of the assessment and I want all students to be successful in it, I am willing to help them with ideas and problem solving if needed. For the rest of the students they should be done with their group Wikiprojects documenting their engineering design process by Monday and will start working on the next task.

Week 6 Agenda

Below you can find a link to the Week 6 Agenda. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post.

Week 6 Agenda

Week 5 Reflection

This week marked the start of the first Engineering Design Challenge I've done with my students (The Balloon Powered Race Car). I've had my students design things before, but never in this same structured way.

One of my challenges going in was that a number of my students are also in STEAM and they do a similar Balloon Powered Race Car in that class. This is good and bad because it means there are a number of students who have already problem solved some of the issues, but it also means that there are more students who might be over powering in the decision making process.

To get around some of the concerns I spread these students around in the seating chart so only one STEAM student was in each group and I emphasized that I was grading far more on whether they were working as a team and listening to everyone's ideas, than if their car went the furthest. While there have been groups that have overly relied on the student who was familiar with the task or where a student was controlling because of their previous experience, ultimately most groups have been working well at respecting everyone's ideas.

 Day 1 Construction

In orchestrating this task I debated a lot over what to provide the groups (I am having my students work on teacher assigned groups of 4). Glue guns and tape were a given, as were balloons (if for nothing else than making sure no groups brought in a giant balloons). I also provided some craft sticks and an assortment of straws to give them a start in constructing. Next year I am debating on giving each group a set number of each of those at the start and letting them bring in extra materials or trade with other groups if they need more. This would save me a bit from having to monitor things. I also bought some wooden skewers that could be used as axles (just in cause some group is nearing the end of the allocated time without wheels that move at all).

 Day 2 Construction

My students will be competing next Thursday, which should be plenty of time for most groups. So far most are making good progress, but I have some that still need to get almost everything done next week as they are not close to having a functioning car. But, the challenge is going well and a nice change of pace for them from the research paper.

Reflecting on Unit 1 Assessment 1

This new month has unintentionally signified the real end of our first task in our first NGSS unit. Most of my students are at a good place with their project and have finished either their paper, the presentation, or both. I still have some who have work to do and this year I have moved to accepting any part of these tasks late, up to a reasonable cut off, so I know I will still have the occasional item coming in.

This first assessment, the research paper, had its challenges and successes. One of the main challenges, for me, was that the structure of the task made it difficult to focus on making sure they had mastery of one part before moving onto the next. With the next assessment they start by building a car, the next part of that task requires to existence of the car, it would be hard to move ahead without mastering part 1. 

With the research paper I still have students who've yet to get mastery on the first part, the Defining Key Concepts Worksheet. These are not my students who are unable to complete the worksheet, these are the students who don't really want to do it, but are totally capable. Until they have mastery of that part they have a zero on the whole project which has a huge impact on their grade. If I were to do this again I might pull these students aside and make them work silently to complete this. As I said, these were students who are capable of completing this independently and we did go over the answers in class, so I expected them to be able to complete it on their own. For some of my other students who needed different support I already worked with them to complete this assignment.

The main success for me was the variety of their questions or topics for the paper. When you break it down (with topics on the fossil record, evolution, extinction, human impact, solar system formation, asteroids, collisions,...) there are topics that span the range of standards we'll be covering in all the units this year. Since, I am working to connect asteroids throughout the year that works great because they've already been introduced to the connections. 

Grading

With the change to NGSS our school has moved towards standards based grading and a 4 point scale. 

To give you an idea of what this looks like with my record sheet, they get 1 point (out of four) for each part they finish, with both the paper and the presentation being worth a half point. 

When I first entered the grades in the grade book the average grades for the classes were as follows: 3.2, 2.8, 2.8, 2.9, 3.1, 2.8, 2.1. A few days after I first entered the scores for my students the average grade on this project for my class periods were as follows: 3.5, 3.3, 3.4, 3.0, 3.4, 3.2, 2.4. Other than that last class (where a number of students have yet to revise their Defining Key Concepts Worksheets), the average score after they saw the impact missing parts had on the grade went up to around a B. 

Student Feedback

Whenever I finish a major activity in class I try to survey my students to get their thoughts. 

No real surprises here. The second part, the research, was difficult for some students and that was apparent when I was checking in with them in class. For the many students the initial difficulty was coming to terms with the idea that you can't necessarily Google an answer to your question. The other difficulty seemed to be that a lot of students were not use to taking a resource and pulling out information to use. I think if I even described it as taking notes on that resource they might have understood the task better. And then a number of students found the paper or presentation difficult, though with the ability to revise most who attempted it eventually did well. Plus, it is the last part of the task so challenge is not a bad thing.

For the amount of time in class my students seemed to lean more to the too much time, considering that was how I felt as well, I may reevaluate how long I spend on it.

This question was interesting to me because ultimately there was a significant percent of the class who would have picked another topic, though I am not sure how I could go about changing that.

Lastly I had my students share what they disliked and liked about the project.

For disliked the lack of a clear time frame was a comment from a few students (given that I was flexible with late work the time frame was flexible) I'll see how this goes with the next assessments this year and decide if I want to reevaluate how I present that flexible time frame. A number of students also didn't like presenting, which didn't really come as a surprise. Some other interesting comments I got from just one student (rather than being a trending comment) was that they didn't find the thinking maps helpful, that they essentially want a checkpoint rubric, and that they didn't like how the topic was somewhat limited, but weren't given a specific topic to research.

For liked many students liked that they could pick their own topic and that they learned something new. This was by far the most frequent comment given. A lot also liked that there was no due date, the amount of time in class they had to work (basically that it wasn't mostly a homework assignment), and that they could revise if they didn't succeed the first time.

Ultimately, I view this project as quite successful. I got great projects, innovative answers, and a lot of student lead investigation. It wasn't easy for everyone, but it was attainable for all. I may try to tighten up the class time a bit and want to work more to clarify the expectation of mastery; nevertheless, I am glad we spend the chunk of class time that we did researching topics that will play out throughout the year.