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?