NCNAAPT member Dan Burns has collected a great set of clips from The Simpsons TV series. Each clip includes a brief description of the physics involved in the clip. You can see them here: www.lghs.net/teachers/science/burns/scienceonsimpsons/Clips.html
Month: October 2009
The Fall Meeting was held October 10th, 2009 at NASA Ames. Please check the notes and summaries below for information of the day’s activities!
Tonie Hansen – NVIDIA The non-profit Charity foundation portion of NVIDIA is working on bringing visualization into the classroom using their computer components. Video games and simulations have been proven to help students learn visual concepts. They are asking for people to be a part of the Advisory Committee to help beta-test the visualizations that would be available online. Please contact Toni Hansen if you’re interested. Contact Information: Toni Hansen, Philanthropy and Social Responsibility 2701 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95050 thansen@nvidia.com CJ Chretien – Leadership Public Schools, Richmond Chretien showed a few examples of video clips available online…
Edna DeVore, SETI Institute, edevore@seti.org “Transit Tracks: NASA’s Kepler Mission” DeVore outline the educational activities available with the Kepler Mission. There are several Kepler Mission Activities, including building an LEGO Orrery, instructions available on website. There are 374 known planets around other stars. At the Kepler Mission Workshop (details coming soon) all participants get to take home an Orrery kit that can work with a Vernier Optical Sensor to model the Kepler Mission. A transit is when a planet is observed in front of a star. Teaching transits can reinforce graphing skills and the graphs that students produced will match…
Keynote Speaker: Sy Liebergot; EECOM Mission Flight Controller for Apollo www.apolloeecom.com This year is the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo program that culminated with landing on the moon. N Cal/Nev AAPT is pleased to commemorate mankind’s greatest adventures with a special appearance of Sy Liebergot. Sy spoke about what it was like to be a Mission Flight Controller when a monster failure occurred during the Apollo 13 mission and landed squarely in his lap. He related the general details of the explosion as they really happened.