Last night was my second (and last, for now) teaching seminar at SPU. Stamatis and Rachel were gone, so Lane took over for the night. His plan for the evening was to have the teachers do energy theater for a "new" scenario, videotape this energy theater, and then watch the video together in class.
While I don't remember the exact number of people, it seemed like there were less participants than in the last session. At the beginning, it was very quite. Lane had posted some "warm-up" questions:
Thought for Food- Consider a wind powered car that can travel downwind faster than the speed of the wind on a level surface.
- Would such a car violate the principle of energy conservation?
- Would such a car violate some other scientific principle?
- Does such a car seem intuitively possible to you? Why or why not?
After he had the teachers think a little bit about them, he showed them a video of a group of engineers/physicists who actually did this experiment and claimed that they had built a wind powered car that actually can travel downwind faster than the speed of the wind (twice as fast, if I remember correctly). Unfortunately, there was not a lot of discussion among the participants.
Next up, Lane said that he wanted to do something for the night that he thought was fun. He told them that they would do energy theater about a little experiment that he was about to show them, and that we would take a video of that and watch it together. The scenario this time was an experiment involving a ruler (meter stick) that was fixed to the leg of a table with a clamp. A metal ring was put on the floor at the loose end of the ruler. Lane pulled back the ruler (together with the ring) and let go, so that the ring was launched across the room, sliding on the floor while giving off a ringing sound.
Before they started with the activity, Lane asked the participants to ignore the camera, and try to talk a lot while they were trying to figure everything out so that they would have something to talk about when they were watching the video later. Then they started thinking about the scenario, individually at first. After some time, some teachers got up, and eventually, the energy theater started.
I took the video, standing on the counter in order to provide a good angle from slightly above. One of the other cameras should have recorded a different angle which might be interesting for future analysis of the episode. The energy theater was great, participants were actively engaged, and after some initial cues, Lane could step back and let the participants do "their thing." The entire episode took about 20 minutes, participants were concerned about the different types of energy involved ("stored elastic," "kinetic," "thermal," "sound"), the different objects (the ruler, the ring, and the environment), there was some string-re-arranging going on, they did the experiment a couple more times, were thinking about energy losses due to friction, and eventually did a first run of the energy theater. And I mean "run" literally. They actually decided that they would have to do it more slowly, in order to be able to observe what was happening, in the video. The second "performance" was more thoughtful, less hectic, and more comprehensible. And that's not a scientific view, just a gut feeling that I had while watching the happening on my tiny little camera screen...
After the energy theater, we took a couple minutes break, and then watched the video. The entire 20 minutes. Lane had written two cues on the white board:
- Ideas about the energy transfer/transformations
- Questions about the energy transfers/transformations
He asked the participants to write down what came to their minds in regard to those cues while they were watching the video. We did that without any interruption, and afterward, Lane asked them to write down which ideas they felt most comfortable with, and which questions they still had about the scenario, on their white boards.
After they had done that, they started the last activity for the day, which was to go around the room and talk to each other which kinds of experiments they could design and do in order to find answers for the questions they still had. They had rulers, clamps and rings to do the actual experiments, and all of them engaged in this task. After some small-group-work, they eventually gathered around one table to do some experiments together, which concluded the evening.
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