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

Fall 2011 Conference at UC Berkeley

Join us the first weekend in November at UC Berkeley for a day and a half of physics education.

Friday evening, November 4th

Social and Lecture Demo Show

• 5:30 No-Host Dinner at Chianlai Thai Cuisine, 2505 Hearst St.
• 6:30 Welcome Gathering and Social
• 7:30 Lecture Demo Sho

Saturday, November 5

Program

• 8:00 Registration, coffee, donuts
• 9:00 Welcome
• 9:15 Show and Tell
• 10:15 Break
• 10:30 “Physics for Future Presidents — A new approach for the non-science student.” Invited speaker: Richard Muller, Professor of Physics, U.C. Berkeley, Faculty Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• 11:30 Group photo
• 11:45 Lunch
• 12:45 Business meeting (in just 15 minutes!)
• 1:00 Two options:
• Tour of Physics Research Labs. Guided tours of physics faculty labs in Astrophysics, Condensed Matter & Materials Science, and Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, led by graduate students and researchers.
• Roundtable Discussion for high school teachers to discuss common problems and solution.
• 2:15 Break
• 2:30 Two options:
• Three concurrent workshops featuring labs and lecture demonstrations from Berkeley and other schools (contributions welcome). Spend the full period in one or circulate among the labs to see them all.
• Modeling Instruction introduction workshop
• 4:00 End

Map

View NCN AAPT Conference at UCB November 2011 in a larger map and/or get directions

Complete program

Download our complete program in PDF format here.

Registration

$20 for NCN AAPT members (includes one lunch ticket). First timers are always free (lunch tickets for first timers are $10). Lunch will be beef, turkey, or veggie sandwiches.

Pre-registration is not required, but will help us know how many people to expect:

(The registration below says it’s free, but that’s just because we’re not collecting payment online. The usual registration fees apply, including free admission for first time attendees.)

[EVENT_REGIS_CATEGORY event_category_id="section"]

Exploratorium Educator Social

An amazing opportunity for Educators from our friends at the Exploratorium:

Professional Development Opportunities for Physics Teachers

The Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PTEC) has a great new map of professional development opportunities across the US. Use the map to find professional development opportunities for physics and astronomy inservice and preservice teachers: http://www.ptec.org/pd/

Spring Section Conference

Our spring 2011 Spring Conference has two components:

Highlights:

Friday Evening Social

April 22: San Mateo High School

• Hot Dog Reception
• Tour of new biotech wing
• “My Favorite Movie Clips” presented by Adam Weiner and Paul Robinson

More details below

Saturday Mini-Conference

April 23: Exploratorium, San Francisco

• Show and Tell
• Invited speaker, Adam Weiner: “Don’t Try This at Home! The Physics of Hollywood Movies”
• Brief business meeting
• “A Physics Teachers’ Guided Tour of the Exploratorium” by Paul Doherty
• Contributed presentations

More details below.

Read more »

Renewable Energy Workshop at UC Berkeley, March 5-6, 2011

The workshop is sponsored by the AAPT as well as the APS Forum on Physics and Society as well as the new APS Topical Group on Energy Research and Applications.

It will be held March 5-6 at UC Berkeley (Evans Hall 10).

The workshop should be of interest to faculty who wish to introduce energy topics into their courses as well as advanced students who might be interested in some aspect of energy research. A similar course organized three years ago was considered a great success. Participants will receive a book of the talks presented.

REGISTER SOON. We sold out when a similar course was offered three years ago.

For more information, see http://www.calpoly.edu/~dhafemei/APSenergy.html

(Thanks to Barbara Levi from Southern Cal AAPT for working on this program and forwarding us the information.)

Modeling Workshop

20 educators attended the afternoon “Introduction to Modeling” workshop lead by Lee Trampleasure and Jon Rockman. Educators were lead through the development of one of the Modeling “paradigm labs.”  The lab used constant velocity cars to develop position vs time data that could be graphed to determine the average velocity of the cars. After groups graphed their data, they created whiteboard presentations of their results. After a discussion of the results, Lee presented data from his classes this year, showing the results of 20 student groups.

For more information on Modeling Instruction, visit modeling.asu.edu.