The key ingredient of a successful hands-on science lesson is to start with a great science activity. I think as teacher educators, it is easy to underestimate how difficult it is for preservice students to find and evaluate science activities. In my “Physics for Teachers” class, students teach a hands-on science physics lesson. But before they turn in a lesson plan and teach a lesson, they are required to submit the activities they strongly considered and two activities they tested out and that they determined to be excellent. I then make the selection of which activity they will teach, helping to ensure that they are successful and that our class enjoys vibrant, relevant hands-on experiences. I am attaching the template my students use for this assignment. Click Here for Physics Activity Template
Rillero, P., & Gallegos, B. (1998). Databases: A Gateway to Literature in Science and Mathematics Education. In J. E. Malone, W. Atweh, & J. Northfield (Eds.), Research and Supervision in Mathematics and Science Education (pp. 323-349). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates (Hardcover edition: ISBN# 0-8058-2968-7, paperback edition ISBN# 0-8058-2969-5)
About the Image
The picture shows two toy cars and is from Adaptive Curriculum’s Activity Object entitled “Newton’s Third Law of Motion.”
This blog focusing on using technology to improve science teaching and learning has been in existence since June 2008. The list of 2008 blog titles for Ed-tech-4-science with publishing dates are presented below. I made hotlinks for articles that I think classroom teachers of science would find most useful. Then I put the titles into Wordle to get the image below.
Much as we may try to deny it, we teachers have known this truth for years:we’re boring.Oh, we fight back gamely, but in a world of television and movies, music and video games, capturing students’ attention is a real challenge.A decade or two ago, the problem was bad enough, but now!Now there are iPods!Now students have music, games, and videos on their cell phones!What chance do we, poor teachers have?
Two years ago, I decided to try an experiment with my Physics class.I decided to fight fire with fire.If the kids want movies, let’s watch movies.And I don’t mean those “educational videos”; I mean real, blockbuster Hollywood movies.No one ever accused Vin Diesel of being boring.No one ever accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of being an old stick in the mud.No one ever accused Keanu Reeves of droning on and on in a monotone…um, yeah…
Speaking of Keanu Reeves, the classic example of bad movie physics is the delightfully improbable Speed, with its climactic scene of a city bus jumping across a 50-foot section of missing freeway.The kids know that such a thing could never happen, but when they work through the calculations to show that it couldn’t, they really gain a better understanding of why it doesn’t work.For an extension activity, students can calculate how large a take-off angle the bus would need in order to make it across.It’s not as large as one might think (or it wouldn’t be if one could ignore air resistance the way we so often do in introductory physics courses).
I recently completed Superhero Week, in which I had my class analyze scenes from Superman, SupermanReturns, Batman, BatmanBegins, and Spider-Man, looking for examples of directors playing fast and loose with the laws of physics.Just to cite a few examples from the first of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, Superman meets Lois on her rooftop and takes her out flying.Why doesn’t she freeze?How can she breathe at that altitude?How come she can fly as long as she’s in contact with Superman, even when it’s just their fingertips touching?When their hands come apart, why does she plummet straight down, rather than following the normal parabolic path of a projectile?When Superman catches her, after many seconds of free-fall, how does she survive the impulse?Shouldn’t she at least have a few broken ribs?Bruises?
In the interests of honesty and full disclosure, I should admit that I did not arrive at the idea on my own.A long-time fan of science fiction and fantasy novels, I first thought of using that avenue to generate interest, but as I searched for resources online (why reinvent the wheel, after all?) I stumbled across a fabulous website:Intuitor’s Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, now also available in book form.
As I dug further, I turned up even more resources:Bad Movie Physics: A Report Card, and 9 Laws of Physics That Don’t Apply in Hollywood. And then there’s my personal favorite (yes, I know; as good as Intuitor is, I think this one might be even better), a book called Don’t Try This at Home! The Physics of Hollywood Movies, by Adam Weiner.My first year of doing this, I pretty much stuck with the suggestions from Intuitor and Adam Weiner.Then, as I gained more confidence, I began searching out my own for movies to use.Once you start looking, they aren’t hard to find.
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.
Last month, I put in some thoughts about capitalization of Earth and Moon at the end of my blog posting (Long-Lost Lunar Pics and the Lunar Slamdown: Some Recent Space Science News). I did not anticipate reader reaction to this, with over 365 comments and dozens of emails–on both sides of the issue. A few readers told me how tears welled up in their eyes, when they read the line, ““If a meteor hits me, don’t I crater? If my plates move, don’t I crack?” Time magazine did a cover story, “Rethinking the miniscule earth!” Many universities are holding meetings to consider updating their editorial style guide. Of course there was the mail from those who disagreed and like many attacks, they took on distressingly ad hominem nature. No doubt some of these were fueled by Fox TV News, who advocated the status quo: “Why change? Rillero is pandering to the liberal media. We think he should be labeled a Lunatic with a capital ‘L.”
But back to reality… I will be the first to admit that grammar isn’t as exciting as science, but nevertheless, I will share some random ideas about capitalization that science teachers and students should know. Start brewing the coffee; it is difficult to get through all this without some caffeine.
General Guidelines
First, let’s start with rule A from the University of South Carolina’s Publication’s Editorial Style Guide: When in doubt, do not capitalize.
Then a good hedge statement always comes in handy, like this one from the University of Chicago:
“But “rules” in writing — unlike, say, rules in Newtonian physics — are not written in stone. They are established by agreement among experienced writers, even though experienced writers can and do disagree all the time.”
I find this an interesting analogy. I wonder if people of science look at grammar as black and white but consider science to be changing and based upon shared understanding. While people of grammar view science as black and white, but consider grammar to be changing and based upon shared understanding. I like using analogies to explain science, but I find it interesting when people use science to explain other things. (But I will save this for a future blog posting.)
From NASA: Celestial Objects
While not everyone would agree with my call to use capital letters when referring to the Earth, Moon, and Sun as celestial objects, NASA certainly does.
According to the NASA style guide: Namesofcelestialbodies such as “the NorthStar,Halley’sComet, Venus,Earth(theplanet),theSun,theMoon(Earth’s) are capitalized.” So let the controversy end!But we don’t capitalize, again according to NASA, “earth(theground) and moonsofJupiter.” I went into this a bit more in my earlier blog post.
For lack of a better organization, let’s fly with NASA for a bit. We also capitalize geologic names such as geologic periods (UpperCambrianPeriod,BronzeAge) and soil groups(Laterite,Tundra).
These capitalization comments are from NASA’s Grammar,punctuation, andcapitalization: A handbook for technical writers and editors written by Mary K. Mccaskill. The entire handbook is online as a PDF document. This guide has way more to it than capitals, so if you want a good free guide to technical writing, have at it. I think it is a good idea to introduce students to different types of style guides.
From NASA: Geologic Entities and Life
Here are a few more capitalization nuggets from NASA:
While we do capitalize days of the week (Monday) and months (October), we don’t capitalize seasons (fall, spring).
For biological names, we don’t capitalize common names (red buckeye) unless they contain a proper noun (Ohio buckeye).
We do capitalize kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus but we don’t capitalize species.
But of course in binomial nomenclature we describe the species with both the genus and species, so for the Ohio buckeye tree, we have Aesculus glabra (see image to the right).
University of South Carolina: More Science Tidbits
Capitalize the formal name of departments but not the informal names. Correct: He enrolled in the Department of Civil Engineering. Also correct: He enrolled in the civil engineering department.
Capitalize entire geographic names and regions of the country but not compass directions or localities. For example: Saluda River Sesquicentennial State Park; Midwest; western East Coast; and northern Atlantic.
Don’t capitalize names of university majors and minors except for proper nouns. For example, “He has a major in Swahili and a minor in biology.”
The names of university courses are capitalized, so for instance, I often teach Methods of Elementary Science 411.
Company trademarks are capitalized. Both of my sons ate Earth’s Best baby food. (This was the first major organic baby food brand and it was started by my brother-in-law Arnie Koss).
“Addresses on Envelopes The United States Postal Service requires that addresses appear on envelopes in all-capital letters and, except for the hyphenated ZIP code, without punctuation.”
I wonder if the US Postal Service has some sort of amnesty program because I better turn myself in for violating this one. But if you agree with capitalizing Earth and Moon, please write to me at this address on the left and if you disagree with my comments and want to do an ad hominem attack, please write me at the address on the right.
Majuscule
In my internet research on capitalization of science terms, I came across a new term: majuscule. It sounds like a school Harry Potter should attend to work on his magic. But this word refers to, as far as I can tell, capital letters. Odd that most people haven’t heard of majuscule, yet miniscule is well known.
Conclusion
If you read all the way to this point, you really have a strong regard for capital appreciation. Capitalization is a tricky affair, but as long as you have your own style guide—there won’t be any capital punishment. Although, we shouldn’t consider the importance of a proper majuscule as miniscule.
For the Record
The first paragraph about the capital controversy was in jest. The address in capitals quote was real but I don’t know if it is true. Arnie Koss is my brother-in-law. The buckeye drawings are from Minnesota Trees and Shrubs (Clements, Rosendahl, and Butters, 1912), which was scanned by Google.
Living just north of Phoenix, we get the warm sunny 70° January weather, but we can drive 100 miles to the north to play in snow. Snow takes on a reverent beauty when you are just visiting it, playing in it, and having the air full of thick, downy flakes. When it makes unwanted intrusions, such as when I lived in New York, Ohio, and Iceland, it becomes more difficult to appreciate.
To the right you will see some snow fun pictures from our snow play in Flagstaff yesterday. It is interesting to see the evolution of “sledding”. Even in my childhood, toboggans were on their way out. Wooden sleds with two rails and a steering bar, like the Flexible Flyer, ruled the hills. I didn’t even see one of these on the hills.The disc or flying saucer seems to be waning.The flexible-foam, body length “sled” is the new king of the slopes. But what slides down the snow best?
The “coefficient of friction” (COF) is used to express the amount of friction between surfaces and this is proportional to the force pushing the surfaces together, or the weight of the rider and sled on the snow. The greater the COF the more friction there is. The COF for not-yet moving surfaces (static friction) is greater than sliding surfaces (kinetic friction). Engineers have measured different COFs (link). For instance, the kinetic COF for leather on oak is 0.52 and for those interested in glass-on-glass action, the kinetic COF is 0.4. Google has enlightened me. I had no idea there was so much research done on snow, and that there is a vibrant field called “snow engineering”, which might be called the ultimate snow job. Without going too deep into it, the COF for a moving skier (ski on snow) was analyzed to be between 0.01 and 0.3. I’d have to think that metal on snow would be a lower COF than foam on snow. It is good to think about, and students could do some fun experiments to find out.
Virtual science experiences must engage students and must have rich interactions. If it is just a Flash animation, I am not ready to call it an “experience” when the term video is much more suitable. If a teacher is going to bring laptop carts into a room or sign up weeks ahead for the computer lab, they should have computer-learning experiences that feature an engagement, a significant interaction, a closure, and multiple means of assessment.
“Sliding on Different Surfaces,” an Activity Object by Adaptive Curriculum, features these aforementioned characteristics. For an engagement, students play a game where they steer a sled down a hill while encountering different types of surfaces. If they steer over the surfaces with the least amount of friction, they will go faster. They receive a score based upon how well they did.
In the student interaction, students are in an office. They slide a pencil case across a desk and then mark the distance. Their mission is to find different things in the room such as a towel, newspaper, and sandpaper (obviously a rough office) and see how the pencil case sliding distance varies. (Elearning Physics Preview)
This elearning physics experience moves forward to an explanation of friction and factors that influence friction. There is an optional paper-and-pencil activity sheet that students can complete as they do the Activity Object, with two questions to be answered when they are finished.The activity sheets promote writing and become a permanent record of their learning for their science notebooks. If a teacher has a projector or interactive whiteboard and is doing a whole class lesson, the activity sheet is even more essential.
After the closure, students move onto the multiple-choice assessment, where they answer five questions and receive instant feedback about their learning. Teachers can log in to access student scores for the assessment. They can also see how long students took doing the Activity Object.If students are up for a bit of gaming, with their new understanding of friction, they can go back to the game and improve their time.
I did the Activity Object and played the game, and I observed that compared to my 8 and 11 year old sons, my sled in Flagstaff went much farther than their sleds. I would like to think that this was because I selected the patches of snow with the least friction and thus I picked up more speed. But these foam “sleds” are not very steerable and so, unfortunately, I have to consider the competing hypothesis that since my mass is a wee bit more than my sons (well okay, actually my weight is about 50 pounds more than both of them together), this may have had an influence. Since momentum is equal to mass x velocity, my momentum should be much greater than my sons’, and thus it would take longer to bring me to a stop. An impulse (force x time) can change the momentum of an object. Since my momentum is much bigger, and assuming that friction is about the same, I coast longer and thus farther.
But I think I will choose the happier hypothesis – that my greater knowledge of friction, rather than greater weight, made me go farther. Which just goes to show the subjective side of science after a happy family day in the snow.
When we add technology to our repertoire of science activities, the best uses are for areas that allow students to do things that they could not do before. A simulation that allows students to explore falling objects with different forces of gravity, like Adaptive Curriculum’s “Free Fall”, extends learning beyond the walls of a classroom.
In a similar way, the best probeware allows students to discover things beyond the ordinary science classroom. So, if a school only had a budget for one probe, I recommend that it not be a thermometer, pH, or voltage probe, but rather, PASCO’s Passport motion sensor. Combined with PASCO’s EZ-Screen, this product is so much fun that instead of selling soda to get supply money, a science teacher could charge students a quarter a try. It is more fun than the token games at our local movie theater.
Motion Sensor
The name “motion sensor” is confusing. One might think it could turn lights on and off when walking into or out of a room. But these don’t; they really should be called “distance detectors”. The detector emits sound pulses that travel outward, and if something is in the path, the sound hits it and bounces back to the detector.It tells how far away a person or object is located, based upon how long it takes the wave to travel to and from the probe. Since it is measuring distance from a fixed point (the detector) in a specific direction, it can be used to track a person or object’s displacement versus time. When the person moves in or out, their displacement from the probe is indicated in the form of a line graph. Thus a student can make a real time displacement-time graph and instantly understand a topic that many students find confusing.
EZ-Screen
The group that designed EZ-Screen should get an award. It is bright, fun, and engaging, which is not easy to say about a lot of graphing software. I recommend starting with free explorations of what happens when students move in, move out, and rest. The graphs show immediately what happens. Charging students twenty-five cents a try is recommended.
The most fun comes when students try to match a graph (see picture). They see a gray line graph on the screen and then try to walk in such a way that the graph is replicated. They see the graph that was created (scarlet) against the match graph (gray), and get a score (100 being the highest). Bringing in the element of competition amps up the engaging value.(Like when I connected my son’s PS3 online and then played his NCAA 08 Football; competing against a real (even though unknown) person made it so much more interesting to play as the scarlet and gray team.) The match graph and the actual graph my 8 year-old son and his friend made is in the picture to the right.How could they have possibly known the sleep over would be this much fun?
Science Class
For science instruction, I break my class into small groups with each having a computer and a detector. They start with free exploration. Then they practice doing the first match graph. After a few trials, they have a competition to see who is the best for the second match graph. I tell them not to do the third and final match. Each group sends their top contender to the front probe, which is also connected to a projector. We then have the finals, to award the title of “Grand Displacement-Time Graph Champion”. This was great fun and learning for my middle school science children this semester, and for adult preservice teachers in previous semesters. If you set up a little bookie operation you can make some more money by taking bets on the finals. I recommend taking 10% of the action.
Of course, with this probe you can do other things as well with other PASCO software, like dropping a table tennis ball and seeing a free fall graph. And then you could go to Adaptive Curriculum to explore free fall with different gravitational forces.
Conclusion
While technology might be used because it makes some things easier, I think when we are on limited budgets, starting with things that we can’t easily do, or that are impossible to do with regular tools makes the most sense. So let your students explore other planets with Adaptive Curriculum, and let them see that some graphing is great fun with EZ-Screen and motion detectors. It’s just too bad that they don’t turn off the lights.
The question is… What will you buy with all the money you make?
Adaptive Curriculum's Free Fall
For the Record
I hope you know I was kidding about the quarters and 10% of the action on the betting. I prefer Twinkies and other lunch snacks instead of quarters and I limit myself to 8% of the gambling action.
The references to Scarlet and Gray does suggest an affinity for Buckeyes.
Some people use the term dataloggers instead of probeware. If you wear smell sensors connected to clothing armpits, these are called probewear, otherwise the term probeware is preferred.
As the novelty of PowerPoint presentations in the K-12 classroom fades, the dim lights and streams of text could inspire sleep instead of excitement in science. There are ways that science can be made interesting through PowerPoints. Interactions, great pictures and graphics can really help make a point and share a story.
Fortunately many teachers and people who support education are willing to share their efforts. Here are several powerful sites for science PowerPoint presentations. Of course, with any collections of resources, not all are great so you must browse through and pick and modify. I think combinations of interactive and exciting elements from diverse PowerPoints can make you have a presentation with many strong elements but that is tailored for your students and curriculum.
Assigning Activity Objects and PPTs with Adaptive Curriculum
Adaptive Curriculum. With student subscriptions teachers not only assign great interactive science Activity Objects but they can also assign or provide any online resources. So students can easily access great PowerPoint presentations without remembering complicated addresses. For instance in the picture to the right a lesson plan is being created with the Activity Object “Color Mixing: Paints and Lights” and is combined with two PowerPoint presentations.
Back on September 11, 2008, I wrote about the new Spore game and expressed concerns about the way evolution is depicted. I also restated other reviewers’ comments that it is a boring game.After the incredible hype approaching the release, the media has been pretty silent.
PBS’ “Online NewsHour”, however, did post this article in October: “New ‘Fun Biology’ Video Game Lets Players Tinker with Evolution”. It seems like PBS put “fun” in quotes because they know it isn’t really fun. The author, Quinn Bowman, goes on to reference my blog entry:
Educational value
Educators are mixed over whether Spore belongs in the classroom.
Professor Peter Rillero of Arizona State University wrote on his blog, which focuses on using technology to teach science, that the mechanics of the creature creation in Spore did not accurately reflect how evolution works.
“The notion of evolution as making choices, as deciding to come out of the water to be a land creature and therefore deciding what appendages to gain, and the thought that the more DNA you eat the more evolved are so wrong that I wonder why Will Wright considers this to be science inspired?” Rillero wrote. ”
But then Bowman adds this quote:
“However, University of Florida associate professor of geology Joe Meert said games like Spore ‘are a natural place for students to gravitate to.’ ’Even the things that (Spore) gets wrong, it could be a teachable moment. Here’s something the game gets wrong. Why is it wrong?’
Dr. Meert seems like a fascinating and good guy and he is someone who wants the public to understand evolution. So with some reluctance I say his comments remind me of College of Education field offices telling interns with crummy mentor teachers, “Well at least you will learn what not to do.” Spore tried to show itself as a great science education tool. We have to recognize first and foremost, that it is not. Teachers should have great mentors, our children should have great science education resources.
I don’t go around boring my friends and family talking about scientific inaccuracies in the media around me.I would not expect history educators to criticize Call of Duty’s portrayal of WWII history. Unless of course, the game made claims that it was a great way to learn history, and started touting all of the historians that had been consulted in developing the game.Spore, on the other hand, deserves to be criticized.
Not only was Spore incredibly hyped, it wanted to develop the idea that it would promote an understanding of evolution. This was evident in the September 9th TV Show: “Build a Better Being” produced and aired by the National Geographic Channel through a partnership with Spore. Getting famous evolutionary biologists to talk about their work, and then showing scenes from Spore, could have encouraged many to falsely believe that the evolutionary biologists were supporting it.
This is far from the case, and the journal Science reported complaints by scientists involved in the documentary. “I literally never heard about Spore until I saw myself on television in this infomercial about the game,” says Cliff Tabin, a geneticist at Harvard University. “It’s an outrage (as quoted by Bohannon, 2008).”
Other Voices of Concern
Fortunately, I am not the lone voice in criticizing Spore. Here are some other views that are critical of the “evolutionary science” in Spore.
It is, in reality, a relatively standard real-time strategy game with the same basic unlocking of features, upgrading of levels, and choices about aesthetics and function as with vehicles or buildings in other similar games. The units happen to look like organisms, the features that can be added are mouths, eyes, and limbs, and the currency is called “DNA”, but really that does not make the game anything more than superficially biological.
So over the past month, I’ve been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn’t just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.
Manure
How does the game’s creator Will Wright respond to the controversy? Well despite the scientific inaccuracies in Spore, he concludes: “It’s manure to seed future scientists” (as quoted by Highfield, 2008). Some quotes are so good they don’t need further commentary.
Enjoyment
Of course there is also the issue of how enjoyable this game is. Here is a clip from the New York Times (Schiesel, December 2008):
BEST DISAPPOINTMENT: SPORE If Electronic Arts has learned anything from its experience with Spore, it ought to be that a software company should just let its games do the talking, rather than relentlessly hyping a game for years before its release only to deliver a one-note electronic toy in the end. Spore would not have fizzled so quickly if expectations had not been so ludicrously inflated to begin with. Perhaps more important, it showed that maybe even a game god like Will Wright, the game’s creator, can stand to be reminded of the basics once in a while. Spore was great at letting the player create something from nothing. But in the end it just wasn’t that interesting to play with. Making cool stuff is a great part of video games, but the play, more than in any other media, really is the thing.
Promoting Spore
Yet, many people are willing to promote Spore because it has science in it and is therefore thought to be educational. It is not difficult to find quotes like this:“With its educational subject matter, Spore is the kind of game any parent should be pleased to find their child absorbed in” (Alderman, 2008).
Conclusions
Since all of the pre-release and release hype, not much has been written about Spore. Pretending to be good science and actually promoting accurate science are different entities, and many in the media will take superficial views. There is a good chance that the media writers also hold serious science misconceptions, so they don’t even know when something is inaccurate. Therefore, it is up to scientists and science teachers to help the public understand which products are good educational tools for promoting science education.
References
Alderman, Naomi. (September 8, 2008). Spore: the game where only the fittest survive. The Guardian, Feature Pages, p. 3.
Bohannon, John (October 24, 2008). VIDEO GAMES: ’Spore’ Documentary Spawns Protest By Scientists Who Starred in It. Vol. 322. no. 5901, p. 517 DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5901.517a
Highfield, Roger. (September 9, 2008). How evolution inspired a computer game. The Daily Telegraph, Science, p. 27.
Last evening my 11 year-old son shared with me the YouTube Video “Charlie Bit My Finger”. If you are more like my son and less like me, you probably have already seen the cute sibling clip that is approaching 70 million views and dozens of new posted remixes and re-enactments. If you do a Google search in quotes, you can find over 300,000 sites sharing or discussing this video.
As science teachers, we know the power of analogies to help students connect new concepts to existing conceptions already wired into their brains. Certainly, knowing what students know is a prerequisite for using analogies. References to pop culture can be a good source. Now, for example, if someone does something that is likely to cause a problem in science class, I could say, “Obviously if you put your finger in Charlie’s mouth, it’s going to get bitten!” And of course, we know the power of humor for keeping science class lively. Every time my son says, “Char-lie bit me and that really hurt,” with a British accent, I chuckle.
I had a science teacher colleague in the Bronx, who argued with me that we shouldn’t relate to students through their culture, but should expose them to a higher culture. Since she went to Stanford as an undergraduate, and I went to the University of Buffalo, it is possible that I never scaled that same cultural plateau (but I did have my high school biology class dissect chicken wings which are world famous because of Buffalo, NY). But I know there are others like me who like to stay connected with the youth we teach.
So how does my generation stay connected with the top videos?
Within the YouTube environment, clicking on videos, you can sort by “most popular” or “most viewed” and you can select the timeframe desired (such as one day, one week, or one month). In this way, I came across “Sneezing Panda”, usable in all sorts of lessons, such as stimulus and response, the nervous system, or animal behavior. There is also the Viral Video Chart, where you can see the graphs of popularity rankings for videos on the internet, not just on YouTube.
Of course, I had to select the category “Science and Technology” to see the most viewed videos of all time in this category. Sadly, most had nothing to do with science, but I found the very well produced and suspenseful “Oxygen (new version) – Periodic Table of Videos”.
So you can search, view, and relate to the world of adolescents. Or, you can wait for an adolescent to share a bit of their world with you. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t discover “Charlie” on my own because it was delightful having my son share it with me. And even though he saw it many times before, when he showed it to me we both had hearty laughs—together.
Resources:
Adaptive Curriculum’s “Habit Designer: Panda” (which will create a much nicer habitat than what you see in the “Sneezing Panda” video.
The key ingredient of a successful hands-on science lesson is to start with a great science activity. I think as teacher educators, it is easy to underestimate how difficult it is for preservice students to find and evaluate science activities. In my “Physics for Teachers” class, students teach a hands-on science physics lesson. But before they turn in a lesson plan and teach a lesson, they are required to submit the activities they strongly considered and two activities they tested out and that they determined to be excellent. I then make the selection of which activity they will teach, helping to ensure that they are successful and that our class enjoys vibrant, relevant hands-on experiences. I am attaching the template my students use for this assignment.
Much as we may try to deny it, we teachers have known this truth for years:
As I dug further, I turned up even more resources:
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?
Last month, I put in some thoughts about capitalization of Earth and Moon at the end of my blog posting (
Living just north of Phoenix, we get the warm sunny 70° January weather, but we can drive 100 miles to the north to play in snow. Snow takes on a reverent beauty when you are just visiting it, playing in it, and having the air full of thick, downy flakes. When it makes unwanted intrusions, such as when I lived in New York, Ohio, and Iceland, it becomes more difficult to appreciate.
tion, rather than greater weight, made me go farther. Which just goes to show the subjective side of science after a happy family day in the snow. 
essed concerns about the way evolution is depicted. I also restated other reviewers’ comments that it is a boring game.
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