The electronic Ohaus scales that I ordered a few years ago are slowly dying. Only half the digits are readable on the numeric displays or in some cases there are no readable numbers. At NSTA in Phoenix, I stopped by the Ohaus booth and the representative was not surprised when I told her this. Unfortunately, she informed me, the scales have only a one-year warranty. From the initial lot we bought, half are unusable.
Using the scales in our science methods classes at Arizona State University, shouldn’t be taxing compared to ordinary high school, middle school, or elementary school use. So it surprised me that the LD50 (a biology term for half a population dying) was achieved so quickly. But maybe my expectations are out of line, our Honda Odyssey, my wife informed me today, has 170,000 miles on it. But a one-year warrant, really? That makes me wonder how confident the manufacturer is in their product.
I like how fast the electronic balances gave readings. No longer were drafts, fast walkers, or table shakers an issue in our classroom, as compared to the old reliable triple beam balance scales. I predicted the end to triple beam balances at the high school and an even quicker death to the elementary level pan balances. But, perhaps I was too hasty.
I am not sure if Ohaus scales are worse then others. The sales rep informed me that in the newer models, the problem has been addressed with the displays. That won’t benefit me; I will put my next order in with a different company. But she also told me of another issue that seems likely to affect most scales that are not top end. Adding too much weight can permanently damage the weighing device. Yikes! It seems like a common occurrence, especially when doing full inquiry experiences, that students would add too much weight. Indeed, it seems like there should be warning signs on the scales about maximum loads.And this brings up a final issue. Why is it that we can’t find good reviews of science apparatus? I have bought things that are great and things that are lousy; wouldn’t it be nice to have a place like CNET that helps us tell what is good and what is not. But if you have scale advice, please do leave a comment.
We all want to avoid having children get hurt doing school science. We also don’t want teachers to avoid doing hands-on science because of fears related to safety issues in the science classroom. For the elementary school classroom there are a couple of valuable resources that can help teachers and administrators develop safer practices for science instruction.
Many of these practices have been written with common sense in mind. And if you are safety minded, you are on the lookout for all the potential things that can go wrong and ways to prevent these accidents. Unfortunately, K-5 classrooms would not have some of this safety equipment, such as eyewash fountains, fume hoods, and safety showers, and probably most middle school science classrooms would come up short in these areas.
While going all virtual to avoid safety problems may be tempting, a more pragmatic solution is to avoid dangerous hands-on materials and be very careful to try science activities before hand, and monitor student behavior.
Technology For K-6 Science Safety
While technology is often thought of as electronic stuff, a better and wider view is that it is any human made products that make our lives better or safer. With this in mind, I present my top ten safety technologies.
1. Teacher Developed Safety Rules Contract: A teacher and students who are safety minded is probably the best defense against accidents. There should be no toleration of inappropriate behavior when doing hands-on science.
2. Goggles: Chemical splash safety goggles should be worn whenever what you are working with has the potential to hurt or damage eyes. Please don’t adopt the view, such as, “I use ammonia at home without goggles, so it is okay to use it in school without goggles.” An adult can decide not to use goggles at home and it is at their peril. If a teacher decides not to have students wear goggles with materials that could harm eyes, and eyes are damaged, the teacher will probably be held culpable, as will the administrators, the school, and the district.
3. Disposable Nitrile Gloves: From dissections to handling chemicals, these can prevent problems. And if a student is bleeding for any reason, an adult should put on gloves to help with the situation.
4. Locked Chemical Cabinet
5. Fire blanket and extinguisher
6. First aid kit
7. Proper waste containers
8. Rubber covered muslin aprons
9. Safety posters and signs
10. Non-mercury thermometers
Teachers should be urged to provide hands-on experiences for their students. But teachers are also responsible for the safety of their students.
It is always exciting to experience the sites and sounds of an NSTA conference. From my first science teacher conference, it was an awakening for me to find out that there are others like me who share my passion for science and education but who did not have an abundance of money to buy materials and who feel time compressed—despite perceptions that teaches have a lot of free time.
I brought my family along for this trip because it corresponded with my sons’ spring break from school. Okay, I admit, I probably wouldn’t have taken them to New Orleans if not for these reasons. I do think, however, exposure to other cultures is a good thing, and New Orleans’ has more than its share of culture. We were even able to go to a locals only crawfish boil (see photo). That my sons might be too young to appreciate New Orleans culture could be suggested by both of them liking the cool stuff in the conference exhibitor’s hall better than any other part of their visit. They were particularly taken by the science curiosities of “Steve Splangler Science” store, where the energetic folks did some intriguing square bubble demonstrations for them and then they were able to activities including tossing bubbles with gloves and making gummy worms. They also liked Flinn Scientific where they watched an engaging rep make foam, just like the stuff I use to close holes in and around my house. Now, they are flying home with a bag full of free materials from Insect Lore including two butterfly larvae that should form a chrysalis in two weeks.
It seems that the giving of t-shirts has achieved greater popularity. I don’t recall, in my first ten years of conference going, ever getting a t-shirt. Then the tech folks started giving away t-shirts and now so are the science folks. My wife doesn’t understand my interest in getting t-shirts, and she has already placed two of them (from Learning.com) in the piles of stuff to give to our son’s teachers. But there is one shirt I intend to keep; it is by far the nicest t-shirt I received, and it was a gray-background and white lettering SPARK t-shirt. I received it from Pasco when I attended a presentation on their SPARK system. Pasco seems to have a great understanding of the needs of a science teacher! So often science technology companies seem like they are devoted to the AP physics or chemistry teacher, who doesn’t have a family, social life, and is not pursing coursework. These rare folks might be able to take the time to figure out how to use complicated tech stuff to do one lab, but most regular teachers find it daunting. SPARK appears to be a solution that is easy to implement, cost effective, and has lots of uses. It acts like a mini-computer with a monitor, and it has its primary function—using probeware. So the yearbook teacher won’t want to borrow your class set!
I have the good fortune to be in beautiful Austin, Texas today for the Texas Computer Education Association’s (TCEA) annual convention. Austin is a delightful city, and this conference is huge. In a couple of hours I am going to be doing my presentation “Critical Thinking and TEKS Science Content Via Online Activities.”
I am placing the PowerPoint file here for participants and anyone else interested in this topic. Below are some titles and resources from the presentation.
demonstrate basic relationships between force and motion using simple machines including pulleys and levers (TEKS: 7.6)
http://2dboy.com/games.php
Creature Creator
prelude to Spore
Free trial edition
How can students making creatures
Develop science content?
Develop critical thinking?
Or both?
Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects
Dancing with the Bees
TEKS 6.12: responses to external stimuli
Determining Planet Layers from Seismic Waves
TEKS 6.6 identify forces that shape features of the Earth; 7.2: organize, analyze, make inferences, and predict trends from direct and indirect evidence
Groundwater
TEKS 6.1: make wise choices in the use and conservation of resources; 6.14 groundwater
Using gooey balls, in the “World of Goo,” to make towers and bridges is an engaging way to build conceptual ideas in physics, engineering, and chemistry. The game made by a team of two guys (Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel) at “2D Boy” won the Innovation Award and Technical Excellence Award at the Independent Games Festival. Goo is available for PCs, Macs, and the Wii. IGN named Goo the best Wii game of the year.In my house, the free trial download version of Goo won the “Win Over the Skeptical 11 Year-Old Award” for totally engaging my son—who proclaimed, “This is addicting!” My eight-year old son called it “very fun.”
That shows the power of Goo. A game that requires no instructions, but you proceed from level-to-level building things to transport the living goo balls. There is something satisfying about building the goo structures, and something powerful about completing the puzzle at each level. Okay, the goo ball creatures and game remind me a bit of the Zoombinis, and the puzzle contexts are not the greatest, but building the structures to solve the puzzle is intriguing and satisfying. And who wants to waste time learning elaborate storylines when there are goo structures to build?
In my trial of the free on-line sample, I built towers and then bridges. Then my 11-year old son took over, starting anew, and quickly blazed past me to get to build balloon structures to help fight gravity. Neither of us met the minimal goo ball rescue at the “Impale Sticky” level, but fortunately we were able to skip this level when we were left a few balls short.
Building a goo structure is difficult to describe but easy to do. You pull one of the goo balls and separate it from the structure. Two or three white “lines of force” (my term not theirs) appear and when you stop pulling it, the white lines become goo links joining the ball to the previous structure. Of course there is a lot of jiggling and the pull of gravity is evident. If you pull a ball too far away from the others, the lines of force disappear and you realize you need to put it closer.
Science Education and Goo
Linking goo balls forms triangular tresses, which are important units of engineering design. Through trial-and-error learning, we experience that triangle goo formations are easy to build and stable. It is a nice contrast, because it seems in the world of play (from Lincoln Logs™ to Legos™), rectangular formations dominate. The tresses are then used to build towers, bridges, and dangling structures. There is a nice science (and international touch) in the use of metric measurements such a “you have 4.4 meters to go.”
The physics of Goo feels pretty real, and this can be a bridge to many physics concepts. As you build structures, the notions of a good foundation and center of gravity come into play. Build it one way too far, and it falls down; keep the center of gravity above the base, and the tower rises. There is also a sense of harmonics/resonance/vibration in that if your structure starts to bend and bob, you have to be careful that your additions don’t cause more of this in an undesired direction.
At some higher levels of Goo, buoyancy comes into play, along with levers and moments, as balloons lift up lever arms. When this is applied to building a bridge, the balloon placement is critical because too much lift or too little gets the balloons popped. Placing the balloon closer or further from the pivot point can decrease or increase the lift.
For chemistry, the most obvious notion is the idea of adhesion and cohesion. Goo balls being attracted to other goo balls is cohesion. When they stick to something else, like the level where you have to climb up out of a canyon and make them stick to the walls, you have adhesion.
How do you Goo?
If you are teaching an engineering class, I think you have good justification to buy a class set of the “World of Goo.” I also think this would make a great addition to the computers of an elementary school computer lab. I can imagine Mr. Cosgrove (my fifth grade teacher) saying: “After you finish your graphs, if you have time you can Goo.” But for stepping softly into the “World of Goo,” give your students an extra-credit assignment to download the free version (link) at home and complete a certain number of levels. They can use screenshots to prove (and display) their work.
Edu-Goo
Winning awards is great and selling lots of this game must be pretty exciting to the creators. But I think the next endeavor should be an Edu-Goo product line. The possibilities are endless so I will just name three: (a) Online competitions between classes, schools, or the world to see who can build the Goo bridge to support the most weight, (b) three-dimensional Goo structures so students can explore using triangular versus rectangular tresses, (c) DNA Goo, where students can construct DNA double helix molecules. Less exciting but useful are worksheets that can guide exploration and discovery. Edu-Goo could have a teacher contribution page so teachers can contribute ideas about educational uses of Goo.
In my “Physics for Teachers” class, when student groups present hands-on lessons, they sometimes start with a YouTube video. They are usually well selected and they turn out to be interesting and short. These videos are easy to find and in a university setting easy to display. While some schools have blocked YouTube as a website because of some content, there are workarounds for downloading the videos as .flv files (such as TechCrunch) and playing or converting them with flv players (my favorite for the Macintosh is the free iSquint.
On August 12, 2008, Smartteaching.org posted their 100 top YouTube videos for teachers. Below, I present their science list.
Using gooey balls, in the “World of Goo,” to make towers and bridges is an engaging way to build conceptual ideas in physics, engineering, and chemistry. The game made by a team of two guys (
How do you Goo?
Entries (RSS)