Group photo from Section Conference at Sacramento State

group photo

Here’s our group photo from Saturday, November 15, 2015 at Sacramento State (click it for full-size):

group photoSixty-six folks in the photo.

In reflecting on our keynote speaker’s presentation, there are 22 women in the photo: 33%. We may be ahead of the physics average, but still have work to do.

Fall Conference – Nov. 13/14, 2015 @ Sacramento State University

Maps and carpool info are at the bottom of the page.

Draft Schedule (Subject to Revision)

Friday Evening Program

No-Host Dinner
We will meet for food and socializing, at Sacramento State’s University Union.
SPS Event – Josh Moss on Recent Discoveries at Atlas
Sac State’s SPS chapter is hosting a free-to-the-public event on campus and we are invited! Josh Moss will give a talk on what’s been going at the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

Saturday Program at Mendocino Hall 1015

Continue reading “Fall Conference – Nov. 13/14, 2015 @ Sacramento State University”

Call for Posters

Are you doing something that should be shared with other physics teachers?  Will it take more time than the five-minute limit in Share-and-Tell?  In that case, please sign up to present a poster.  We’ll start the conference with our poster session, and have another go at them during lunch.

In order to encourage people to contribute posters, we will print 3×2 posters at a subsidized rate, free for K-12 teachers and grad students, and $25 for college and university professors. These posters should be submitted as PDF files, and this offer has a deadline of October 30.  Once your abstract is registered, you will be emailed additional instructions.

What topics can be covered?  Anything that tickles your fancy as a physics teacher that you think will help our community.  This could be a neat experiment, original research, cool projects for your students, a report-back from a field trip that worked, an innovative way to approach grading, or anything else that you would like to share with fellow teachers.

But what if you’ve never done a poster?  Here are some templates plus a sample poster:

Here are some more links that might help get you started:

At the end of the day, don’t get too caught up on how pretty or ugly the poster looks, we want to hear your ideas!

For those printing out their own posters, let’s max out at roughly four feet by four feet.

Excellent resources on NGSS

Val Monticue, our very own Secretary, continues to contribute to our deeper understanding of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Her website is full of resources, and her goal is “to introduce teachers to the pros while mitigating the cons as much as possible.” We encourage you to visit her site:

Stepping into NGSS.

NGSS: For states, by states

Pluto New Horizon Mission Tweets

You can see the latest developments for the Pluto Hew Horizons mission. Their most recent tweets appear below (they make take a few seconds to appear, and you can scroll down to see older ones).