The Transportation Problem

 During the summer, when @whowe67 and I met to plan the IPC year, one of our original ideas was to do the force and motion unit with mousetrap car kits.  Making those cars would be a part of a STEM curriculum as they tried to solve the challenge of putting the kit together to make a car.  But as we continued to talk about what we wanted the year to look like, we realized that giving students those kits would be too teacher-directed, and discarded the idea.

However, we kept the idea of doing some sort of transportation design on the island.  After many brainstorming sessions, we chose parameters for the unit.  The devices would have to travel 10 meters, but no further (because otherwise they would fall off a cliff on the island).  And it would have to carry a cup of water without spilling it.  The students weren’t allowed to seal off the cup to prevent the water from getting out.

The cup of water was a nice call-back to their first challenge – purifying the water.  Also, many of them used their renewable energy sources from the previous power unit as a way to provide power to their devices.  One of the good things about integrating the whole year into a consistent story line is that all the units have significance and can be relevant for a future problem. 

I had eliminated batteries as a source of potential energy for their devices, so the students were left with using either gravitational energy or elastic energy.  They quickly realized that gravity could give them a great deal of power, but because going over 10 meters was a design failure, it didn’t offer a lot of control over their transport method.  During their presentations, many groups explained why they decided to use elastic potential energy, and I was happy to see the detailed thought process that they used to evaluate the two sources of energy.

My students found a variety of ways to solve the problem of transporting the water, but many of them discovered the mousetrap cars via YouTube. 

With the parameters we added to the problem, the students couldn’t copy what they found on YouTube directly.  For one thing, the car had to be stable enough to carry the cup without spilling, and for another, the platform had to be big enough to hold the cup.

During the presentations, I was thrilled to hear the students talking about how they had to change the design from the original, the problems they encountered, and the reasons why things weren’t working.  The depth of critical thinking they demonstrated was impressive.  While the basics function of the mousetrap car remained the same, my students found many solutions to the problem of carrying the cup.  They also made use of a wide variety of materials, many of them salvaged from their kitchens and garages.

If we had kept our original idea of handing everyone a kit, then I wouldn’t have seen so much creativity in the students’ final presentations.

More Rigor in Electricity

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Since I have been teaching IPC, the electrical unit has been a paint-by-numbers sort of affair.  We have board with metals pegs, various electrical components that fit over the pegs, and ‘lab’ sheets that say, “do this, then do this, then do this.”  The booklets that came with these kits include questions that are at the most basic level.  The hardest thing about the whole unit was distinguishing Ohm’s Law from the electrical power calculations and inverting the resistance for parallel circuits.

The unit has always seemed like a curriculum afterthought, something to do to keep students entertained during May, after the state test and before final exams.  It has been a yawn fest for both the students and me.

The actual state standards that mention electricity say:

n   Examine electrical force as a universal force between any two charged objects and compare the relative strength of the electrical force and gravitational force.

n   Demonstrate that moving electric charges produce magnetic forces and moving magnets produce electrical forces.

n   Evaluate the transfer of electrical energy in series and parallel circuits and conductive materials.

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter112/ch112c.html#112.38

When @whowe67 and I planned the year-long IPC PBL unit, the electro-magnetic standard was the only one that we couldn’t fit into the scenario.  We had vaguely said that we would work it in when we did power, but we started the year not knowing exactly how we would manage it.

This is a great example of the necessity of flexibility when running a PBL unit.  The plans that @whowe67 and I made over the summer were complete, but over the course of the year, many of the units have changed from our original concept.  Some have been a natural change as we’ve gotten a better idea of the how the year is progressing, and some of it has been at the request of the students.

In the case of electricity, when I was writing the power unit, I realized that electricity would fit into it perfectly.  The challenge for the students became, “How can we design a way to turn a turbine that will generate electricity, given the resources on the island?”

The sources of power on the island would be wind, tides, geothermal, solar, and hydroelectric.  We bought lots of copper wire and magnets, so the students could make simple generators.  The challenge here was two-fold – use one of the renewable resources to move the turbine, and build a generator capable of turning on a tiny light.  The students would use their previously built shelters and wire them either in series or in parallel.

When the students had to actually build an electrical generator, we had many conversations about the very basics of electricity – what it is, how it moves, what a magnet does to electrons, and how the forces between the two interact.  They went far deeper into the concept than I have ever seen in my years of teaching IPC.

Not all the generators were successful.  Some could only measure the electricity produced with a sensitive multi-meter.  But the struggle to design and redesign is where the true learning took place.

We still covered the series versus parallel issue and electrical calculations, so they weren’t missing anything from what students in previous years had done.

What we gained was an enduring understanding of the concept and a way to apply it to other situations.  I have never felt that the electrical unit was rigorous enough until this year.

The Point of Learning Logs

 

One of the buzzwords in my district is ‘innerput’.  This is the process by which we take information and internalize it in order to use it – to apply to a new situation or allow us to optimize our creativity.  The progression of learning using this paradigm is something like this:

INPUT  - information from various sources including research, teacher, reading, or videos

→

INNERPUT – reflection, writing, internalizing, processing INPUT

→

OUTPUT – the information can be applied to a new situation, whether on a standardized test, a new problem, or any other student product

Innerput or reflection is equally necessary for teachers.  Writing these blog posts is one way that I gather my thoughts and put my ideas in order.   There are other ways, but for me, nothing connects learning to understanding quite like typing or writing things by hand.

In a Project Based Learning classroom, innerput becomes even more crucial.  My students are exposed to a vast amount of information via their research and design activities.  If they do not take the time to slow down and process what they are encountering or doing, then they will not get to the deep learning necessary to understand the concepts in my class.

To give my students a chance for innerput, one of the methods I use is the daily learning log.  This is a document that they create and keep, and they should write down what they have done or thought about or learned for that day. 

A learning log can be just about anything that shows information being processed.  Some examples included data tables from testing, design ideas with drawings and explanations, facts from research with summaries of why they are important or relevant, and further questions that their research has uncovered.

Convincing my students that a learning log is crucial has been a battle.  Most students didn’t really produce decent logs until the start of the second semester.  Next year, I think I will try to scaffold the learning log requirement, gradually letting them have the freedom and choice as to how their learning log will look.  I may do something like have questions related to each mastery concept for them to answer or a concept map to fill out.

Another issue has been that students will copy something directly into their log without stopping to think about what it might mean.  This is where my conversations with students become so critical.  Usually my biggest clue that they don’t know what they wrote is use of ‘big words’ or overly complicated sentence structure.  When this happens, I need to have several methods of assessing students’ mastery of a particular concept so I can tease out whether they really understand it.  Many times I will question them, they’ll reply, and I’ll ask further questions.  As we dig into the details of the concept, the student will gradually get a deeper understanding of what they had researched.  At that point, I will tell them to write down what we just talked about in their own words.  Then I look at their learning log again and ask additional questions if necessary.

When I see them pull their notebooks out for reference, then I know that they have produced a good learning log that they can use to apply the information to other situations.  They are gaining a deeper and more enduring understanding of the concepts when they can use their own writings as supplementary materials.