The videos on television show some of the massive destruction and the human toll of the recent earthquake in Haiti. It is difficult to imagine the suffering of the Haitian people. It is an unfortunate example of the devastation of a magnitude 7 earthquake.

It is natural to wonder why or how. When students are ready, teachers may want to discuss  earthquakes and their causes.

The folks at IRIS have a website with a PowerPoint presentation and Quicktime movie that explain a lot of details associated with this particular earthquake and earthquakes in general. The PowerPoint has excellent pictures of the destruction to buildings, without presenting images of human suffering that would be difficult for some students. The image to the right is taken from the PowerPoint.

IRIS (AKA the Incorporated Research Institutes for Seismology) has lots of resources for learning about earthquakes including SeisMac 2.0 which allows Macintosh computers to become seismographs.

In the quest for Science Literacy, we strive to give students an understanding of natural events before they happen. Adaptive Curriculum has two strong Activity Objects, one is on determining the magnitude of an earthquake and the other is determining the location of the earthquake. The image below is from “Earthquakes: Measuring Magnitude.“

I had the good fortune last week of being a conference presider for Irfan Kula, a talented educational designer. His session was “I Love Symbiosis.” He emailed me his PowerPoint presentation, and I am presenting this here:  i-love-symbiosis-kula.

I am at the NYSCATE Metro Conference, in Rye, NY. I grew up about 45 minutes from here but I forgot that it is still cold in mid-May. But of course, everything is relative, and relative to Arizona almost everywhere else is cooler.

This is the nyscate-critical-thinking  presentation I am  doing today. 

The Texas Computers in Education Association conference just ended and I am on the plane heading home. It is a nice conference, with lots of exhibitors, presenters, and attendees. I am going to infer that Texas loves science, because at my presentation, which had a narrow niche of middle school science, critical thinking, and state standards, I estimate there were 300+ people.  I posted the PowerPoint for this presentation on the last blog.

I also was filmed three times, twice for video blogs and one for a web page.  In all three cases I was discussing the Activity Objects of Adaptive Curriculum. Two of these are already available at District Administration – Product Posts and Scholastic Administrator – The Royal Treatment

 I thank District Administration’s Kurt Dyrli and Scholastic Administrator’s Ken Royal, who did one of the first articles about Adaptive Curriculum after interviewing me about two years ago at FETC. Ken really enjoyed the Activity Object on Francisco Redi, who helped disprove the idea of spontaneous generation. When Ken was a former science teacher he did this science experiment in class, replete with decaying meat and putrid smells. 

It will be interesting to see if the idea of video blogging takes off. I suspect that it will do well as a medium, as long as it has either more attractive or loquacious people than me!

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. 

Click here to access the PowerPoint. tx-critical-thinking2

The text for the slides is presented below. 

What is Critical Thinking?

Some Elements of Critical Thinking

Design a Satellite

ž  describe types of equipment and transportation needed for space travel. (TEKS: 6.13)

ž  http://www.eduweb.com/portfolio/designsatellite/

The World of Goo

ž  demonstrate basic relationships between force and motion using simple machines including pulleys and levers (TEKS: 7.6)

ž  http://2dboy.com/games.php

Creature Creator

ž  prelude to Spore

ž  Free trial edition

ž  How can students making creatures

—  Develop science content?

—  Develop critical thinking?

—  Or both?

Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects

ž Dancing with the Bees

—  TEKS 6.12: responses to external stimuli

ž 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

ž Groundwater

—  TEKS 6.1: make wise choices in the use and conservation of resources;  6.14 groundwater

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.

Probing Into New Experiences: Probeware, Displacement, and Science Learning, December 30, 2008

PowerPoint Science: Can PPTs help show the exciting side of science? December 28, 2008

Spore Revisited: Manure for Future Scientists, December 26, 2008

Seeking Analogies and Humor with the Net Generation: Charlie Bit My Finger, December 23, 2008

The Starch Test and This Blog: Photosynthesis, Science Education, and Technology, December 26, 2008

Virtual Distance-Time Graphs: Getting Up to Speed, December 16, 2008

Technology Conferences and Science Teachers: Fun & Learning, December 6, 2008

Long-Lost Lunar Pics and the Lunar Slamdown: Some Recent Space Science News, November 17, 2008

A Reader’s Question: Apollo “Hoax”, YouTube, and Fifth Grade Science, November 10, 2008

Chain Reaction, Science Education, and Literacy, November 6, 2008

Static Electricity and Happy Halloween, November 4, 2008

Philly Cheesesteaks and Technology for Science Education, October 26, 2008

Wordle: Seeing Science Words as Images, October, 22, 2008

WolfQuest: In Search of Missing Science and Fun, October, 2, 2008

The Circuit Construction Kit: Amping Up Explorations in Electricity September 29, 2009

Is SPORE a Bore that Promotes Science Misconceptions? September 11, 2008

Tyranny of Terminology: Science Vocabulary and Technology Help, September 10, 2008

YouTube and Science Teaching and Learning, August 23, 2008

Partnering for Shared Interactions: The Two-Mice Computer in Schools? August 19, 2008

Creature Creator’ as a Prelude to ‘Spore’: What Value to a Science Teacher? August 18, 2008

Elementary Science Education Software from the 1990s, August 16, 2008

Scientific Free Exploration in the Virtual Realm: People, planets and Orbits, August 7, 2008

Tangibles in the Balance: Physical Versus Virtual Science Experiments, August 6, 2008

Enhancing the Arizona Sun: Technology Misdirected, Critical Thinking, and Inquiry, July 18, 2008

Virtual Schools: Leading the Charge towards Change, July 15, 2008

The Activity Object: Terminology for Educators, July 14, 2008

Physical Versus Virtual Hands-On Science Experiences, July 7, 2008

An Army of Two, June 29, 2008

Electronic Screen Time, June 29, 2008

The One Computer Classroom, June 2, 2008

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. 

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 9^th 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.

T. Ryan Gregory and Niles Eldredge describe Spore in this way:

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.

John Bohannon wrote in “Flunking Spore”:

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.

National Public Radio. Talk of the Nation, September 12, 2008. Spore’: Does Evolution Really Happen Like That?

Schiesel, Seth. (December 21, 2008). The Zombies Look Better Every Year. The New York Times. Arts and Leisure Desk; VIDEO GAMES; Pg. 24

Snider, M. (September 9, 2008.). Social networking goes gaming. USA Today, Retrieved December 24, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

Perhaps the first assay we learned in science class was the starch test, where we dropped iodine on a substance, and if it turned “blue-black”, it indicated the presence of starch.

Now, as modern-day science teachers, we carry on the wisdom of generations of science teachers, and continue to avoid calling the positive result “black and blue”, as no science teacher wants students to associate bruises with white bread or potatoes.

The starch test has become such a common test, that I believe the term “starch test” should replace “litmus test” as the analogy cliché for social or political tests. (For example, Wikipedia states, “A litmus test is a question asked of a potential candidate for high office, the answer to which would determine whether the nominating official would choose to proceed with the appointment or nomination.”) How many non-science teachers even know what litmus is or what a litmus test is? Let’s start using analogies more people can relate to. [People would really start liken that (with an intended pun on the nature of litmus)!]

Today is the six-month anniversary of this blog. It seems such a short time ago, but alas, on June 20, 2008, my first blog was posted. This made me wonder, “How does one know if one is successful after just six short months?

To find the answer to this query, I did a search on blogs. I found no numerical metrics for success. Looking at the latest report from Google Analytics, I did see that more than 35 people per day have read this blog, and that this month alone, there were over 1,000 readers from 70 countries/territories.

The search for blogs about blogs (i.e. metablogs) yielded no numbers, which I viewed once again as evidence that collective wisdom can often be found in groups of people. The qualitative metric I did derive, however, from reading the advice of more experienced blog pundits was this: If a blogger enjoys writing about their interests, and some people are reading, then it should be considered successful. As far as this starch test is concerned, I judge this blog as a success, and I thank you for reading it.

But now on to science teaching and technology, which is the focus of this blog. In the living world, photosynthesis is one of the most important processes. Fortunately, Adaptive Curriculum has a free interactive activity that teachers and students (from all 70 countries/territories) can use to learn more about photosynthesis. In “Plants Needs for Photosynthesis” students conduct several investigations, where they can add or subtract water, light, carbon dioxide, and oxygen. The plant then does its thing (AKA: metabolism) for four hours.

After this, the starch test is performed to see if photosynthesis occurred. In the starch test, the leaves are boiled and then dipped into hot alcohol to remove the green chlorophyll. Next, the leaves are dipped into room temperature water. Finally, drops of iodine are placed upon the leaves. Through these discovery-based learning experiences, students are able to determine the conditions that are needed for photosynthesis to occur.  

Thank you to Adaptive Curriculum for giving us this free Flash-based activity, and for their support of this blog. And no matter what your starch test or litmus test for happiness may be, I wish you a happy holiday season.

Resources:

If you (or your students) don’t know what a litmus test is, here are some links:

Adaptive Curriculum’s “The Properties of Acids”

Adaptive Curriculum’s “The Properties of Bases”

Adler, Kris Lesson Plan: The pH scale. 

Whether at the high school or middle school level, students studying graphs of motion are often confused. One area of confusion occurs in the difference between distance-time graphs and displacement-time graphs. Virtual activities can cause more confusion, unless the right ones are chosen.

Distance-time graphs are a part of many middle school math and science curricula. A Google search for “distance-time graphs” reveals about 10,500 websites with many Java-based and Flash-based online activities. The problem for physics learners and teachers is that in many cases, the developers call their graph a distance-time graph but in reality they are displacement-time graphs.

Here are some examples of (otherwise) good websites making this error:

Moving Man 

Football (soccer) Distance Time Graph

GCSE Bitesize 

There are a few good sites that accurately portray distance-time graphs.

“Crocodile-clips” is a simple, free site where students move a helicopter and create a real-time distance-time graph. It doesn’t matter if the helicopter is moved away from or closer to the starting point. The true distance traveled is displayed on the graph. It is simple but effective.

Commonwealth Curriculum Pack (CCP) is a more involved site. I used this with my mixed age physics class last week and it made the point and kept their interest.

This site uses the context of the 100-meter race to show different arrival speeds. Quickly, my students learned that the steeper the slope (gradient), the greater the speed of the runner. Then we viewed several nice animated sequences of interpolation, which they then interpreted.

PBS Teacher Line http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/resources/activities/race/readings/race.htm.

Students observe stick figures run 400-meter races. They can see the runners move at actual speeds or average speeds, so this serves as a good way to help students understand instantaneous speed versus average speed.

Motion graphs will probably always be confusing for some students. We can reduce confusion with distance-time and displacement-time graphs by using internet resources that accurately portray the difference.

Additional Resources

Adaptive Curriculum’s Activity Object: “Truck On: Position and Velocity-Time Graphs” 

The Physics Classroom Tutorial: Distance and Displacement