Afternoon Submitted Papers & Workshops

The audience at Spring 2012

Mark Hurwitz, Fathom in the Physics Lab

Mark demonstrated how to use the Fathom program with Vernier probes to graph and analyze experimental data. The program allows students to quickly drag and drop meters, tables, graphs and more. Students can also manipulate graphs so that they can visually see the differences between their data analysis and what they expect to see. Mark’s students are able to use the program at home as well so that they can continue to analyze their information. Fathom only works with Vernier probes.

Bree Barnett Dreyfuss, Review Strategies

Bree discussed a variety of review strategies that she has used in her classroom. Aside from a traditional review, students can review materials using a variety of games or projects. Bree uses a lot of materials available from the Resource Area For Teachers, or RAFT, to create her games and activities.  The entire powerpoint and accompanying materials are available on her website here.

Evan, White, CSU Chico – The Beneficial Application of Stupidity in Inquiry

Evan read an article about “absolute stupidity” (link coming soon) and discussed his own pursuit of pure science through inquiry. Evan is in the credential program now and has been experimented with inquiry in one of his units as part of his student teaching program. He experienced success using an Inquiry Model and plans to continue it.

Cathy Cox, Lake Tahoe Community College – NASA Research Opportunities for Community College Students

Cathy discussed her recent experience with NASA’s Community College Aerospace Scholars program with her students and their research project “Structural integrity and mathematical modeling of singular soap bubbles in micro gravity and hyper gravity.” Students had to develop their research plan, device, secure funding, etc. before heading to NASA’s Houston facility. Cathy described the process of applying to the program, creating the apparatus and their work with their NASA assigned mentors.  Cathy showed several pictures of their research and experience on the zero-gravity flights.

Leanna Ferlardo, Oroville High School – Remediation That Does Not Stink!

Leanna described a few remediation strategies she uses. Her first strategy is to develop Mastery Quizzes on each main unit. Students are told that they have to pass the Mastery Quiz with 100% or the score will be entered as a 0. Students are given the test a few times in class and must retake it until they reach 100%. After the first few times in class students have to make the effort to come in and retake the Mastery Quiz until they get 100%. Students are very motivated to retake the test to get the 100% because otherwise they have a 0% and the tests are heavily weighted. Leanna also records the number of students that missed each question so that the ones that are missed frequently can be reviewed in class. Students can review their test and have the option to retake the test with different tests and can increase their score. Leanna provided examples of a Mastery Quiz, her grade book and several sample tests.

Business Meeting

Election of officers: 
David Marasco will continue as President, and will also absorb Program Chair
Dennis Buckley will continue as Treasurer and Membership Coordinator
Frank Cascarano will continue as VP Colleges/ Universities
Leanna Felardo will continue as VP of High Schools
Bree Barnett Dreyfuss will continue as Secretary
Lee Trampleasure will continue as Webmaster and will also be the Section Rep
Paul Robinson will continue as a Historian
Tom Woosnam will continue to provide insight as a Past President

Read more »

Keynote Speaker:

David Bennum, Recruiting Physics Majors from Grades 2-8, University of Navada, Reno

Keynot Speaker Spring 2012

There is little development of Physics curriculum in the lower grade levels and thus the population that could be interested in Physics is scared away.  Dr. Bennum has created a “Physics on the Road” program that brings science into local schools to introduce young students to Physics. Dr. Bennum shared several pictures of his program over the years of students at assemblies and workshop with middle school and elementary school students. The program has reached up to 2,000 students in the K-8 programs each year. He continues to develop new activities and demonstrations for the program, including plans for building a Howler Trombone based on a Howler pipe design (link). Several buses have been donated over the years to bring students and equipment to the program. In recent years the project has also added some astronomy concepts and using telescopes. The hope is to expand the program to include college students from University of Nevada, Reno to accompanying the Dr. Bennum to the local schools. There are plans to have a large public viewing for the upcoming solar eclipse at the MacClean Observatory at Redfield Campus.

The Physics department at the University of Nevada, Reno is also developing an Astronomy  Minor and Astrophysics Major. The hope is to create an option for students who are interested in Astronomy or are in a major that requires scientific literacy to take some classes. This has developed an off shoot program, ”Taking the Stars on the Road” to increase the local interest in Astronomy. The University has struggled with decreasing numbers in Physics and have adjusted the requirements for majors in order to decrease the “scare factor” and make it much more accessible.

Spring 2012 Share & Tell Notes

Lee Trampleasure, Carondelet High School  – deriving the kinematics equation experimentally

Handout available here.

Students use TI calculators to derive the kinematics equations. Students graph a linear position-time graph for different constant velocity cars. Student graph the data by hand and then uses linear regression to calculate the slope which will vary from student to student as their best fit lines differ. Students then plot a constant acceleration car and graph that data in their calculators. By taking various tangent lines students create a separate graph of the velocity-time for the car. Using the equation supplied by the calculator they begin to see the relationship between their y-intercept on the y=ax+b equation from the velocity-time graph matches the b in their equation for the position to time graph (x=at^2+bt+c).

David Talcott, Carlmont High School (c/o Bree) – Planck’s constant apparatus

Recently David has posted about a homemade device to derive Planck’s constant. Below an excerpt from David’s explanation:

Planck's Constant Apparatus

The concept is pretty simple, shine light on a piece of metal, electrons eject, detect energy of electrons for each frequency of light, plot energy/frequency, slope is planks constant.   There is a phet simulation that illustrates this process. The device that I have built use a phototube (1p39 or 929 tube) these can be purchased on eBay for about $35.  The rest of the apparatus costs about 35 dollars.  The Sargent welch equivalent cost around 800 dollars.

John Boyce , iFly – indoor skydiving

John Boyce demonstrates devices used in the iFly tunnel.

The iFly Education website has more information.

John is encouraging Physics teachers to come to any of the eight iFly facilities as a field trip. Students will be able to tour the facility, learn to fly, participate in flight and walk away with pictures and video. Several members have taken field trips there and enjoyed it.

Frank Cascarano, Foothill College – SawStop.com

A former science teacher became a patent lawyer and developed the SawStop. An electrical signal is put onto the saw blade and as soon as an electrically conductive material comes in contact with the blade the potential difference drops. This signals the saw to stop in a hundredth of a second. A powerful video using a hot dog demonstrates the concept. The blade is electrically isolated and thus the saw must be bought separate and is a “one time shot.”

Mark Hurwitz demonstrates a ring launcher

Mark Hurwitz, Lick-Wilmerding High School

Mark demonstrated his Ring Launcher commonly used to explain Lenz’s Law. The common rings made of plastic, aluminum ring with a slit and an aluminum ring without a slit. In addition to that there is a coil with a light bulb. An additional demonstration then is to move the coil and lightbulb down the length of the rod and observe the brightness increase as it lowers closer to the coil.

David explains Lenz's Law

This led to a great discussion led by David Kagan about how such demonstrations are not actually demonstrating Lenz’s Law. We look forward to linking David’s full explanation soon.

Bree Barnett Dreyfuss, Amador Valley High School – Leyden Jar examples

Bree explained that her students build a simple Leyden Jar capacitor out of a film can. This year she experimented with the dissectable Leyden Jar available here. Through a lot of dramatic demonstration you can use it to teach students that the charge in a capacitor is stored on the plastic of the cup. Several years ago a student made a much larger version of the Leyden jar (picture coming soon) nicknamed the “Freshmen Killer” that she had not yet used. When the student came back to visit he insisted that they experiment with the Leyden Jar. Bree purposely took the shock provided by the dissectable Leyden Jar (not recommended) and felt a shock through her mid-foreman. When she did the same with the larger Leyden Jar (really not advisable) she felt a shock up to her shoulder. Smaller Leyden Jars can light a small neon bulb but the larger Leyden jar can actually light an 8” fluorescent tube!

Gunjan Raizada Chakravarty – Sowing the Seed of Physics

Dr. G demonstrates several different quick demonstrations of Physics that she uses with younger students to break the cycle of fear surrounding Physics.  Several easy to access kid-friendly materials can be used to explain different aspects of students. Dr. G travels to different schools and provides demonstrations to kids about Physics.

Lee Trampleasure, webmaster, updated the membership on the new tools of the website. He introduced informative polls, the new job board and our RSS feed capabilities. Lee is even creating websites for several other sections of AAPT. Way to go Lee!

Spring conference in South Lake Tahoe, April 21, 2012

Join us at Lake Tahoe Community College for a day of physics education.

Saturday, April 21st

All sessions are held in the Duke Theater, Room F111

Read more »

New physics job listings bulletin board on our website

For 2012 we’re introducing a new online bulletin board where you can post and search for job openings. The web address is http://ncnaapt.org/jobs.

• To search, just click the links in the menu on the right side.
• To post, click the “Register” link at the bottom of the right side menu, and follow the simple instructions to register. You can then post your job opening announcement.

We are limiting postings to positions at schools, colleges, and universities, so please don’t post jobs with tutoring agencies, etc. (if you’d like us to do this, please contact us with what you’d like to post and we’ll reconsider this policy). The NCN AAPT website gets about 500 hits per month, so we hope to be a resource for connecting job seekers with jobs.

Call for presentations at our spring meeting

Our spring conference is set for Saturday, April 21, 2012. The location will be Lake Tahoe Community College, in South Lake Tahoe, CA. We’re now looking for proposals for talks/papers (10-15 minutes) and programs/workshops (30 minutes to two hours).

We accept proposals in all areas of physics education and/or research, and we usually can fit them all in. Deadline for submissions is March 5, 2012. This year we’re taking all proposals online, you can submit yours at http://ncnaapt.org/submit.

First timers are particularly encouraged to submit a proposal–remember that AAPT and its sections exist largely through the contributions of its members (we usually have an invited keynote speaker, but the rest of the program is “just us”). If you’re doing something in your classroom/lecture hall/lab that you’re proud of, please take this opportunity to share it with others (and remember, there’s almost nothing that’s truly new in education, so don’t worry if you think someone has presented it before).

Keep your eyes peeled on out site for registration information (we’ll post this in early March), and be sure to Friend us if you’re on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Northern-CaliforniaNevada-Section-American-Association-of-Physics-Teachers/127898515559

Lodging in South Tahoe

Our Saturday, April 21, 2012 conference may entice people to spend a night or two in (possibly) the snow. Below are options for lodging in the South Lake Tahoe area:

Hotels

The lodge of choice is Timber Cove Lodge (Best Western).  This hotel is right on the water, includes breakfast, and is 1.25 miles from the college.  They are holding 40 rooms at a group rate of $87.99 per night (mention AAPT).  The phone number is 530-541-6722.

Another close hotel is the Motel 6, which is not bad.  The rate is $49.99 per night and it is also about 1.25 miles from the college.  The phone number is 530-542-1400.

Casinos

If people are interested in staying at a casino, they are around 7 or 8 miles from the college.  The nicest is Montbleu, and Harrah’s is also nice.

• Montbleu – $130 – $159  phone 1 888 829 7630
• Harrahs – $79.00 – $109 phone 1 775 588 6611

Vacation getaway

If you are interested in really having a Tahoe vacation, I recommend The Fire Side Inn.  This is a 15 – 20 minute drive from the college, and is right at the edge of town, close to beaches, the bike trail, etc.  They include complimentary snow-shoes, bikes and a sledding hill.  They are a very cozy, cabin like place.  $119 – $255.  Phone 530-544-5515.

View South Lake Tahoe lodging for NCN AAPT meeting in a larger map

Spring Conference/Meeting, save the date: Saturday, April 21, 2012

Our spring conference is set for Saturday, April 21, 2012. The location will be Lake Tahoe Community College, in South Lake Tahoe, CA. More information, and a call for presentations/papers, will be coming in early 2012, but keep the date on your calendar.

We will likely have a social event, but we haven’t yet decided on Friday evening or Saturday evening. There’s also been talk of a group ski event on Sunday (hope for late snow)!

Keep your eyes peeled on out site, and be sure to Friend us if you’re on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Northern-CaliforniaNevada-Section-American-Association-of-Physics-Teachers/127898515559

Please take a moment to help us plan the best weekend:

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High School Roundtable

As part of our support for high school Physics teachers we held a High School round table in the afternoon at our Fall meeting. The topics of (1) discipline, (2) level of curriculum, (3) grading/ paperwork and (4) making policy changes were discussed. Some material is available on each topic under Roundtable Resources. You can also download the High School Roundtable Notes from our discussion; if I left anything out please let me know by emailing BreeBarnett@hotmail.com.