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How To Get High-Schoolers Involved In Real Science?
Wellington Grey writes "I'm a physics teacher and have been wondering what ways it's possible to get students to participate in or donate to real science projects. I encourage my students to help out with things like Galaxy Zoo (which has just released a new version) and to get them to install BOINC on their personal computers. Do Slashdotters out there have any other suggestions that would be appropriate for the 11-18 age range? Extra credit if you can think of a way that I can track their progress so that I can give them extra credit."
I think the answer has something to do with a Poser model, a government mainframe, and a freak electrical storm...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"I'm a high school student and my physics teacher always comes up with ideas to get us to participate in or donate to real science projects. He even encourages us to help out with things like Galaxy Zoo (which has just released a new version, grrrr, dreadful updates again) and even gets us to install BOINC on our PERSONAL computers. Do Slashdotters out there have any suggestions that would be appropriate to satisfy this 35-year-old physics teacher? Extra credit if you can think of a way that I can fake my progress so that I can get extra credit."
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
I think the term you are looking for is citizen science.
Take pictures of space!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/18/1645216
You could have them monitor HF propagation beacons to track the effects of the new sunspot Solar Cycle on the ionosphere.
You could have them do balloon launches.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Kelly LeBrock.
Have you tried to show them successful stories like this one? High schoolers are more prone to do something that a) has good chances to success and b) has very good chances to make them look good. Show them enough successful projects like "hey, how cool is that, uh?", and you probably will be able to gather even the not-that-geeks.
AT &F1DT0,T0800665544 - Real men, real help desk support.
Why is this story red on the front page, is it hot hot hot?
or even better: make a survey, check what their are interessed in. crpto is always good. historic cyphers in WWII e.g., one-time-pads (ok, that's math)
You want to get students interested in "real science", then as your examples you cite some computer programs? And they learn what from this?
When I was in school, the best science was *always* some sort of physical demonstration. I still remember being in physics class where we calculated the speed that a ball ought to go down a ramp, fly through the air and hit a spot on some paper. I marked an "X", and sure enough, the ball landed on the X (within experimental error).
I also remember being fascinated at my local science museum at a big box with pegs and a bell curve painted on the glass. Every few minutes balls would fall randomly through the pegs, yet fall into the bell curve. [of course, in recent years they got rid of all the cool stuff in favor of "corporate demonstrations" that totally suck, but that's another subject]
Then there were the chemistry experiments... and field trips to the park... you get the idea.
Make science real by making it something physical that students can see/touch/smell.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
When I was in high school in my chem AP class, my teacher had set it up so that at the end of the year we all had to read a timely chemistry research paper that had been published in a major journal and prepare a presentation on it for the class. This may not be what you want to hear but from what I remember of my chem. AP curriculum, I was grossly underprepared to do any serious research. However, I definitely remember than dealing with both a research subject and the academic publishing style gave a lot of background for my future.
That said, I'm computer science not chemistry, so I guess I don't know how that would have turned out in the long run. Even though I'm not chem, I know that the experience in reading real research papers definitely prepared me for graduate and research coursework in college more than anything else in my time in high school.
That said, my minor is physics, so I do know a little bit about that as well. If you've done electromagnetism/electronics, I would encourage maybe giving your students an electronics project. It was nice to have a little practical lab after all that theory. An infinite field of one ohm resisters is one thing - rewiring your coffee maker with a job server is another (btw if any of your students actually manage to do this, send me an email). That said, many of your students (I was one) may really like theory and Maxwell's equations and vector calculus, so don't make the course too EE based.
How To Get High - Schoolers Involved In Real Science?
Red Leader Standing By!
I'm a physics student, and I got my *teachers* involved in real science last year in my senior year of high school :P The school was smack-dab next to a prominent research university, so all we had to do was ask. A professor even hired me...as a physicist...in high school! Professors are always willing to do cool stuff for kids to show off what they do - send a few emails around and see if you get any bites! ^_^
I know I've been out of school for a while, but I believe what you're looking for is called a SCIENCE FAIR.
There's a great documentary on a teacher who faced the same challenges and found innovating ways to overcome them. He needed to give his students some projects that would have real-world results that could be measured. In the end, he helped a classroom of very talented kids construct some world-class devices that made breakthroughs in the areas of lasers, inertial guidance, optics, and more.
Very inspiration stuff, I highly recommend watching. Professor J. Hathaway should be commended for his innovative approach to this exact situation. More information on the documentary can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
How carbon cannot come from water (so-called water-into-wine). How horses can't fly. How seas can't just rise up.
Form a FIRST robotics team. One of their goals is to get a FIRST team in every high school.
I want my airbags tested by an enthusiastic teenager, not some beaten down engineer with years of backbreaking experience.
All they need is the desire to succeed, in order to do bridge building or aeronautical design. Surgery too.
I suggest you read Slashdot
The problem with high school science is that it is learning what has already been learned. You should try some experiments that you yourself and the rest of the world doesn't know what the outcome will be. So you have them run the experiments document them and try to get it published.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As im sure your student will ask, what will I get for this "Extra Credit" and is it exchangeable for cash?
Test me and I will chronicle your pain - The Archivist (Diablo 3)
LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL!
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Get them to join your team on Boinc and see how far up you can climb in rankings. Also, maybe give credit for students that earn most boinc credits?
If you want to motivate kids to learn computer science, show them that the computer can locate porn.
If you want to motivate kids to learn chemistry, show them how to make meth.
By the way, I am willing to consult for your educational system. My rates are quite reasonable.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
There is a new group in NYC, htink (www.htink.net) with a charter to assist in exactly this kind of thing. We recently had our first major event that helped 40 people bootstrap on electronics by providing freeduino build kits (an arduino clone) and then 2 workshops using the arduinos to run electrical components to produce pretty lights.
We have found through makenyc (www.makenyc.org) that people learn best when:
1) They are in a team of 3-5 people
2) They feel like there is little or no competition
3) They know that on completion of the project, they will have something to take home.
For makenyc for instance, our recent project of building boats and racing them taught composite building techniques, hydrodynamic concepts, and participants left with a practical feel for how different boat designs and materials work.
-Eric Moore - www.htink.net
Let them blow up stuff. Really. They still may not like science afterward, but they'll have fun and it will weed out the stupid.
That is all.
I did a rocketry project one year in physics and found out later that my teacher included it in his curriculum every year thereafter.
When I was in high school, there was some kind of pilot program that I participated in where we helped do actual scientific research.
Now I have no idea how they set it up or whether our work was ever actually taken seriously by anyone, since I was just a student at the time. I didn't have insight into that sort of thing. But the setup was that the teacher was put in touch with an organization that did research regarding weather patterns. We were given access to collect remote data from various weather stations, and even helped set up a few weather stations ourselves.
So at the beginning of the year, the organization and the teacher worked out some projects which involved a fair amount of grunt work and not a lot of expertise (i.e. something a group of students might have some hope of doing) but that might possibly be helpful to the organization (at least supposedly). We were given a few options of different questions we might pursue, and then started collecting data under the supervision of the teacher, who I believe was something of a meteorologist to begin with.
After a semester or year, whichever it was, we tried to pull together everything we'd done all year, analyze the data, and come up with a report to send to this organization, attempting to answer the question they asked us to research.
Looking back, I would be very surprised if our work was at all useful to anyone. In fact, I have no doubt that the report very quickly found its way into the circular file, though they may have kept some of the data we collected for their own purposes. But at the time, that really didn't matter. It was kind of thrilling anyway.
I don't think it was thrilling because of the science itself. Weather was far less interesting to me than something like relativity or quantum mechanics. What was thrilling about it was:
Show them how to brew up some explosives. Extra bonus points if they use them to bomb Federal buildings. With that approach you combine science and government. Your colleagues will love you for fostering a cross discplinary approach to education.
Adam Savage (from Mythbusters), wrote an article in Popular Mechanics a few months ago talking about science the US education system.
I have been thinking about this and have realized that I grew up with science and math being pushed. Today, it is legal, Liberal Arts, and business "real world" garbage that is pushed. Our society needs to go back to the 40's, 50's, and 60's when kids learned science/math in a real fashion.
I have also thought about the fact that we had real science kits. Over the last 8 years, we have been turned into a nation of cheerleaders and flag wavers (literally). We need to get past this fear garbage and bring back science kits. That includes chemistry, electronics, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There is a 3d protein folding game called Foldit that would be appropriate:
http://fold.it/portal/info/science
It is an experiment to see if human problem and puzzle solving can be superior in ways to the existing protein folding projects like Rosetta@Home, Folding@home, etc.
But besides that you get to learn in a visual way about proteins and solve real problems.
If you want them to actually learn something and apply themselves, recommend interactive science software like Fold It (http://fold.it/). Otherwise, how about not encouraging them to waste so much power.
Or at least have a classroom discussion on the relative merits of using things like BOINC, vs the fossil fuels that ultimately power them. Ethics in science is virtually untouched in the schools I've attended.
Show them a salary survey for Scientists and Engineers.
Compare these salaries to the ones that are obtained working at Mac Donalds.
Don't mention MBA salaries.
I've always been interested in Real Science. How do I code up my own perfect, obedient, all-powerful chick with great tits and a great ass?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
At my high school there was a normal Physics class, but a separate after school lab. Our teacher lured us in with free computers, and challenged us with experiments while we were there. The lab has oscilloscopes, a/d converters, lasers, electronics - basically a physics funhouse.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
have them build a wiki for the express purpose of getting science information being used in high schools all around the world.
Break it up in a manner that looks at each topic scientifically, and easy enough to read for the grade
That way they need to learn about how science works.
Done correctly, and kids could be adding there own experiment and finding things they like in science for years to come.
In fact, it could be used to generate a curriculum for science classes..a FREE curriculum.
Freshmen could be tasked with picking a subject and fact checking it. A very powerful skill.
This could improve US high school dramatically, and you could start it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Step 1: have them sign a statement to the effect that they donate their body to science
Step 2: shoot them
Step 3: if necessary, shoot them again
Mission accomplished!
Very nice reference - obscure; appropriate. Hadn't thought about Weird Science in many years.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah... I got nothing.
Pr0n
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is a bit more mathematics than general science, but I'd suggest GIMPS for a chance to find a huge prime or, if they're more interested in actually finding a prime than searching for an enormous one, I'd suggest No Prime Left Behind (NPLB).
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
You are teaching them science is boring. Stop it!
BOINC is interesting if your machine finds the aliens, and actually told you it did.
Galaxy Zoo is for when there is no fresh paint to watch dry.
In my physics classes in high school we DID things, and then we explained the math behind them, and why that was physics. Most interesting physics demonstrations involve statics, harmonic oscillation, analytical mechanics - physical motion - or at least the interesting ones do.
Sometimes we'd just start the week with letting people ask questions about things that made them curious that might be related to physics.
Here's a list of projects we did, and which your students could do:
- build bridges out of balsa wood to demonstrate statics principles and the ability to bear loads (by loading them up until they break)
- build water balloon catapults and see who throws the balloons farthest
- build ping-pong ball alcohol canons
- launch model rockets, preferably with instrument payloads
- build hover crafts using vacuum cleaner motors and race them down the hallway past the principals office
- build a Focault's pendulum to demonstrate rotation of the earth
- put a bowing ball on the end of a rope and show it doesn't smack you in the face because you let it go and it doesn't get energy added to the system on its way back
- demonstrate the coefficient of sliding friction with a triangle block, a square block with a hile drilled through it, some twine tied through the hole, and a fishing scale
- build a model roller coaster
- build a tesla coil and use it to shoot aluminum rings cut from the ends of pipes up in the air
- build a blower box with an orange traffic cone glued on top and float a ball there to demonstrate Bernoulli's principle
- dig out the switch/relay/light boxes from the 1960's classes and wire them all together to build an adder
- use a Van de Graff generator to make people's hair stand out straight from their heads
- show them a Newton's Cradle execu-toy
- put grapes in a microwave oven to demonstrate plasmas
- make little boats with wedges in their backs, stick pieces of soap there, and race them to demonstrate surface tension
- spin buckets of water without the water falling out
- shock people with Leyden jars
- build a Wimshurst generator
- build a Sterling cycle engine with a bicycle wheel and rubber bands
And that is just stuff we DID, off the top of my head, 20+ years ago -- stuff I still REMEMBER to this day, in my day job as a SCIENTIST -- because I had a great physics teacher in High School.
-- Terry
Don't show them all the bad offshore outsourcing news either...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
"Science Friday Videos".
They do a great job of explaining.
Have them play a puzzle game that solves protein folding problems that can't be solved by computer algorithms. http://fold.it/portal/
the DIY physics of how to create life, food, fire, weapons, mobility, money, sanctuary, security and how to hack anon free Wi-Fi...
The will love you their everlasting lives, forever!!!
http://www.rocketcontest.org/
It's an annual competition, and it geared towards getting 11-18 year olds into aerospace sciences. Many vendors in the model rocketry business give discounts to TARC teams, including building supplies, engines, design software, and flight electronics. There's a whole range of participation from the most simple to very complex. There may even be a local rocketeer, NAR (http://www.nar.org/) section, or Tripoli (http://www.tripoli.org/) prefecture close by who can help with the technical details. Membership in one of the national clubs brings a 1M+ insurance policy and a helpful intro magazine.
There's all sorts of ways to gauge progress, and lots of intermediate steps that can be used for credit (calc the launch profile by hand; code a basic simulator; determine Isp of the engines you use; design the rocket with cp and cg calcs; design a shock mount and test it). The involvement can be quite wide if you want to involve lots of disciplines -chemistry, physics, history are easy ones, but you can grab english if you add Vernesque literature, biology if you want to discuss spaceflight limitations, government if you want to get in to political treaties and regulation.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
But that may not be answer wanted. Real science involves curious observation of something that does not comply with known assumption, systematic study to verify the validity of the observation, and, if valid, further observations to relate the disparate fact to the broader laws, resulting in modified or restructured laws. So to do real science all a student has to do is go out into the world, write down things he or she does not understand, and the research the topic until some degree of understanding emerges. Extra credit will of course be given for any observations made, as long as the description is detailed and accurate. In science observation is half the battle, that is why it was so important for scientists to learn how to draw. More extra credit is given for real research using secondary sources, and then primary experimentation. For an 11 year old, the question would be why does the hot water run out. For a older girl, why does some makeup make me break out. Perhaps a new driver might want to know why we have school zones.
This may not be an answer either. So we have applied science where we take emerging technologies and use them in practice to help establish validity and create new stuff, or to find new phenomenon. This is what the question seems to be alluding to. For instance, so cleaver person realized that we would see a drop in light when a planet passes in front of the sun. Know any scientist can apply that insight to postulate new planets. We have the technology to look for non-random signals from space that we would postulate indicate life forms. We can take accessible robotics to create new structures. The galaxy zoo is fun because it teaches kids organization. Other examples of this are organizations that over a few years has kids build suborbital rockets, or design and build other projects. These tend to be sexy and attract those that want something they can hold in their hands.
Science is also about becoming an expert in a field. An 11 year old that knows everything about dinosaurs, or galaxies has experienced the joy of being an expert. A senior who can work through newtons laws or work in vapour pressure tables has experienced such joy. One thing we can do as teachers, which is seldom emphasized, is allow a student to delve deeply into a single area and become an expert. Like the middle school student who has learned dinosaurs, the knowledge may never be applied to a real problem, but the experience of learning, developing, and categorizing the knowledge is important in itself.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
GPS chips, arduinos, and sensors that can detect pollution are cheap. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Smell-Pollutants/ Get students to create a mash-up map of their local environmental pollution hotspots by wearing a portable detector around.
use a Van de Graff generator to make people's hair stand out straight from their heads
My physics teacher didn't have hair, so we used the Van de Graff generator to make sparks jump from my finger to his head. Much more fun...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think that while the average student should just learn the science as best they can. There are often good research opportunities for the superstars. Most university and industry labs would be happy to mentor smart high school students in research projects. There are lots of summer programs set up for high school students to do research. Simply search for them in your locality or consider contacting local universities and companies doing research. They need to be willing to do some grunt work in exchange for the experience, though. Its worth noting that many of these pay wages that are much better than the average highschooler usually gets. Its still worthwhile to the company because $10 per hour is still a lot less than the $25 an hour that most postdocs get or $50 an hour that professionals get.
When you're not doing that, you are desperately trying to find a new angle on old data to write a paper for publication. You need to do this in order to keep your reputation (and therefore pay and ability to get funding) hot. Once written, you'll spend more time trying to get it published somewhere, or peer-reviewing some other guy's paper.
Almost never will you get into the lab, and even when you do most of your time will be spent setting up, calibrating, tweaking, debugging and modifying your equipment. The chances of you making a discovery that will be named after you are infinitesimally small, as all the good ones are already taken. Even then, you'll probably be dead before anyone recognises the contribution you have made - or the true value of your work.
You best bet, if you want your children to become successful scientists, is to teach them how to stay awake in meetings, diss their colleagues while appearing to be friendly, engaging in office politics, learning to recognise who to scmooze and kiss up to and marketing old ideas with a new spin - every year for the rest of their careers.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Just teach the the basics of science eg physics. Leave research projects to those who have their own original ideas (like the weather balloon experiment) or those on the cutting edge of science. Too much research done in science is bs to pad resumes and academic careers. Besides research is extremely boring (unless you are the PI).
hes kinda crazy but good talk http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html
Seriously, blow shit up. NOTHING gets a bored teenager more interested in science of any kind than an explosion.
Don't worry about the smart kids, unless - like me - they figure out how to make something like silver acetelide, con the lab assistant into handing out the needed chemicals, and then sprinkle the aforementioned unstable compound all over your desk.
If you really want to push the physics aspect of it, start something like a model rocketry club/group. Hell, you can even start out with a 2-litre coke bottle with water and pumping air into it. There's a lot of science in doing something as simple as that and seeing how high the bottle flies.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Let them use proper explosives, and let them make their own thermites, black powder or napalms. They'll develop an aptitude for chemistry (and perhaps an appreciation of medicine).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm
Let them play with a decently-sized ballista, trebuchet, or onager. They'll learn all about dynamics and ballistics, wind resistance, action-reaction (the onager kicks a bit), and the delivery of kinetic energy via projectile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onager_(siege_weapon)
However, if they combine the explosives with the projectiles, their neighbours will study the law.
[Yes, I had a dangerously mis-spent childhood, and turned into a chemical engineer]
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I would think that as a physics teacher, you could foster some motivation by explaining the amount of physics used in many types of video games. This could be used to create interest in mathematics, as in order to get anywhere with computer programming a strong math foundation is essential, and many children (not just the boys anymore) spend at least some time playing video games. If kids knew how much math was needed to actually make video games, they may become more interested and we may even see a rise in the number of math and computer science majors...
Running computer programs is nice, and might help out someone else (if they're watching). Chances are that the kids won't get much from it.
Instead, have them do something they want to do. When I was in high school, there was a program for chemistry and physics (over two years), and the fourth quarter of Year #2 you did independent work on whatever you wanted in the chem/phys realm.
Of course there were rules and regulations. At the beginning of Year #2, we had to submit a list of possible topics, then submit somewhat fleshed-out versions of 5, then finally pick one (with instructor approval, of course). During Year #2, each quarter we had to submit a reading list of possible sources for our projects (10-20 per quarter, I think). If you changed subjects, you had to re-do the reading list. During class, you could do whatever you needed to (read stuff, work on tests, pick the instructor's brain). At the end of the year, you had to submit your write up (with appropriate citations), along with some sort of physical object (model airplanes and the wings you shaped, rusted and cleaned metal plates, videotape of the giant jello pool you were studying for wave actions, etc.) to go with your project.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
There are several astronomy-related organizations that do exactly this:
Variable star observations:
http://www.aavso.org/
Occultation timings:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/occultations/3304051.html
Radio astronomy:
http://www.radio-astronomy.org/projects
Projects coordinated by the Astronomy League:
http://www.astroleague.org/al/news/proam/proam2.html
Transitsearch:
http://aas.org/archives/BAAS/v36n2/aas204/44.htm
Ideas from Pennsylvania JAS:
http://www.astro.psu.edu/~kluhman/pjas/projectexamples.html
And don't forget the IYA initiatives:
http://astronomy2009.us/projects/
To me, one of the biggest downers of doing experiments in any science class was that I knew that what I was doing was trivial and had been done before. There was no real reason to do the experiment as the outcome was already known. Since I was quite willing to believe the peer-reviewed and much-previously-repeated scientific material at face value, I did not feel I needed to waste my time rubbing my nose in the hard experimental evidence. Yes, Virginia, I really do believe that if I mix this goo with this other goo a precipitate will form, just as it has for everyone else who's done it since the mid 1800's or so.
If we are going to do some experimentation, let's experiment with stuff where the answer isn't known! Now THAT would be interesting.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Lie to the students and convince them that scientists get huge paychecks, huge bonuses, huge respect, and girl/boy friends with huge (place favorite body part here) just like Wall street traders that destroy World economies or rap/hip hop "artists" that preach (and often preform) misogyny and violence.
Sadly, science is a road to becoming an underpaid lab rat or high school instructor. I gave up designing computer systems and portable devices to pursue systems analysis and programming. The opportunity, hours, and money are better.
I suggest: Explosion Club
First rule of Explosion Club: You do not talk about Explosion Club.
Second rule of Explosion Club: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT EXPLOSION CLUB.
The last rule of Explosion Club: If it's your first time, you mix the chemicals yourself and will blow something up.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
High school science tends to be rather basic. Here is a way you can make F=ma really fun. You can buy model rocket kits in bulk for education from many vendors. I like the people at this site a lot: http://www.apogeerockets.com/
/.ers. $10 each from 20 people would get you enough for 24 rockets!
Get a kit for each kid, or one for each team of two, and make them go home and build them. They can handle it. These kits are easy enough for a 4 year old with little testors and a little elmers. (I know because my son assembled one at that age (except for the parachute)) Then teach some of the physics... calculate how high, how fast, etc, and then go launch them! Use of an appropriately small motor will allow you launch on the football field. Actually the site above has a whole education section, with educational materials, technical info, newsletters, rocket kits in bulk, etc.
I know it's not free, but I bet you could get a local hobby shop to sponsor the activity, or even hit up us
-- QED
Last fall, I attended a Faraday Lecture. This is a lecture consisting of really cool science demonstrations and things that teachers can use in their classrooms to really blow students away -- think of things that blow up and other nifty demos. This was done in Pittsburgh, but a quick google search on the topic indicates that perhaps Rutgers does this as well.
How about talking to the government about giving NASA a big funding boost (hey, why not as long as we're going into debt for trillions for bankers and stock-traders anyway?) and getting some serious and ambitious manned missions planned?
Nothing gets kids fired up about science as much as the thought of growing up to be an astronaut. Back during the space programs' heydays of the '60s and '70s, it was actually *cool* to do well in school, science in particular.
Since the rollback of manned space exploration missions public enthusiasm for science & research along with technical education, particularly among children, has dwindled. It's not so much a matter of motivating individual students as it is giving the generation a goal to push for other than becoming some anonymous corporate cog in some corporate lab researching cereal sugar-coatings or lower-cost hairbrush manufacturing methods.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
There's a reasonable chance that there's somebody at your local university that would be interested in working with some interested high school students. Finding that person could be the tricky part: I'd suggest going to the relevant department's web site and see if you can find somebody who does outreach/recruiting/admissions.
I actually spent some time with Foldit. I learned very very little. Then they introduced awful music that was like fingernails on the chalkboard to me. Requests to provide a feature to disable the "music" without completely muting the program were ignored and unresponded to (muting was not a solution since audio feedback for some operations is critical). It drove me to kick the cat, beat the wife and abuse the children. I can no longer run foldit, and suggest that for the sake of world peace others avoid it too.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The summer before my senior year in high school, my physics teacher took me and two other students under his wing for the summer to work on real X-ray astrophysics data. The next two summers I worked with him as a teaching/research assistant and helped about 20 students total work on real data analysis projects.
As a result I got three papers published in professional journals (two as first author) and won a scholarship that paid my entire way through college.
I know most schoolteachers don't usually have the resources to do programs like this (or the education - my mentor had a PhD in astrophysics), but there's really no substitute.
Check out Make: Magazine at your local library or newsstand. We didn't actually create Make: as a classroom text (and it definitely isn't), but we've received hundreds of letters from teachers who suddenly discovered that kids love its hands-on project-based approach to science and tech. Kids like that we're not afraid to have a some raucous fun with tech and that we don't talk down to them. And you don't have to spend a dime to check it out. Just camp out on http://makezine.com/ for a few days. If you happen to be in the Bay Area May 30th, 31st, bring your students to Maker Faire at the San Mateo Expo Center. Students (13 - 20) can spend an entire day at Maker Faire for $10 if tickets are purchased in advance. Compare that to Six Flags. And MakerShed.com has some awesome DIY tech kits for middle schoolers and teens as well. Good Luck!
There is an outreach "master class" scheme involving the LHC where your students can get their hands on data (simulated at the moment but real eventually!). While the tools are simplified compared to what we actually use for an analysis you do get to look at and study real data. You could try talking to CERN to find out if this is available in whatever part of the world you are. We also have a video conference scheme which I've taken part in before where someone from your local university will come and visit and set up a video conference with other people at CERN to discuss the LHC and the physics we do.
There are also various cosmic ray projects that your school can get involved in. If you are in Alberta then your local one is ALTA which is run by a colleague of mine. There are others in various parts of the world as well. These link together multiple schools in a region to build a large air shower array.
No, really:
http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/SCOOL/index.html
Engineering week has been creating and running really fun to do, cheap to do, hands on, creative, projects since I was in college in the '70s. Dig into their archives and have your students do the projects. Create a list of 5 or so projects. Have the students in the class vote on the projects and everyone does that one. Then, for extra credit, you let them do as many more as they want over the school year. Allocate time in class for people to demo their projects and require a nicely formatted report as part of the project. (That last is so you can maybe work a deal with the English teacher for extra credit there too. Even students appreciate a multi-bird stone. :-)
If you can't deal with that, then try writing games. Yes, writing games. Getting a good animation going requires vector math, lots of good dx, dy, dz stuff leading into calculus and the physics of motion and interactions. Just getting a realistic ball bouncing in a cubical room can illustrate tons of physics. Yeah, what I'm saying is don't have them run simulations, have them write them. Call it writing video games and 90% of the kids will be all over it. OTOH, there will be parents waiting for you with pitch forks and torches, so be prepared.
Yeah, I've used writing video games to teach programming, math, and some physics and I've been involved with engineering week. Best fun I ever had was getting a bunch of blase science teachers up in the aisles nearly dancing just by getting them to actually *make* a Mobius strip and cut it down the middle instead of just talking about it and pointing a picture in a book. Kids love it too.
Very few science teachers know shit about their subject. They know shit because they really couldn't give a shit about it.
Stonewolf
This is like asking Dilbert how to get management excited about a fast Fourier transform. You would be better off posting this on Facebook.
You shouldn't give extra credit for work on this. It would create an economic bias towards students who have money for faster or multiple computers.
it should tie back to the real world. Show kids how to make hydrogen to fill balloons (either via electrolysis (carbon rods are east to get) or using strips of alumnium and sodium hydroxide. Likewise, how to make batteries. Heck, teach them how to make firecrackers. Once kids realize that they CAN make useful things, they will.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
the word explosion keeps coming up. This would seem to appeal to most young males. But I wonder what would appeal to young females. Assuming any exists on slashdot (as rare as unicorns they be around here), what would appeal to young females? Explosions? Or something different?
Please let us know.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Coming this fall, Galaxy Zoo has plans to add the ability for teachers to create logins for a classroom of students that are linked such that the teacher can see all the students classifications. We are also looking to add more educational content, and to set up an "Educators Zone" for sharing activities and ideas. We still in the building phase. Tell us your ideas and we'll do what we can to make the best ideas real! Learn more here.
Take a facts-based journey at Astronomy Cast. Explore the universe at
My high school physics teacher had us make rockets out of 2-liter soda bottles. We made our own fins and customizations and he placed them on a high-pressure water launcher and fired them off. We got points for height, multi-stages, parachute landings, etc.
Very sad. While some of what you say is true, most of what I enjoy as a scientist is the parts where I get to actually try and answer a question that no one knows the answer to. There is some part of what you say to being a scientist, but it is not nearly as important as you make it out to be. Being a scientist is fun! It can be boring at times (what job isn't), but it has very fun parts that keep me going to work.
From my classes, also:
* Pop balloons full of hydrogen, to demonstrate the coolness of things exploding. (I guess? I don't remember the point of that, really.)
* I had a chemistry teacher who had some chemical concoction he called the "flaming snowball." It was a whiteish, gel-like material he rolled into a ball and lit on fire, but the cool thing was that it's combustion point was so low that it was perfectly safe to handle while flaming. We'd throw it around the classroom and such. A little googling, here's a "flaming snowball" lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0CUZ94lXYM
Comment of the year
FIRST Robotics
www.usfirst.org
It's a wonderful organization that encourages Teamwork, setting and obtaining goals, engineering, programing, electrical, machining, resource gathering, entrepreneurship, fund allocation and gracious professionalism.
A team of High Schoolers gets 6 weeks (starting early January) to design, build, program, and test a robot with the purpose of playing a different game each year ... check out the site .. it's fascinating
Sorry, but I think you and many of the others here need to go back and read his question. He didn't say he wanted ideas for labs, he said he wanted his students to contribute to real science, as in, do things that lead to publications by professional physicists. While I did many of the experiments that you did and found them interesting and learned a lot from them, none of those produced publishable results. You made fun of Galaxy Zoo, but the work that the thousands of people did who participated in that experiment led to real publications in the astronomical literature. Astronomy in particular is a science where amateurs can contribute and I think he cited Galaxy Zoo not because he thought it was better than building a Foucault Pendulum, but because it has a different goal -- it is getting his students to put in their time as essentially free labor on science projects much larger than they could do in class. Although, maybe you know of a high school building a 3.5 meter telescope with a drift scan camera and multi-object spectrograph that is recording images and spectra for a million galaxies. Because at that school, kids could get the same experience the ones in his class got by participating in Galaxy Zoo.
if people dont like science, there is probably a good reason for it. why dont you try asking them?
science in the classroom is all about beauty and elegance and wonder and bettering humanity.
science in the real world is about Dilbert, greed, profit, creating fantastic new weapons, destroying the planet, and destroying civil liberties.
but i guess defeating nazi germany is 'safe' in your book
Some things that could be tracked:
In essence, have the students create an extensive longitudinal almanac on every last corner of campus. Then you might take it a step further by seeing if they notice correlations by comparing one set of data to another, both with different data sets over the same time, and in comparison to previous years.
It would demonstrate that science is relevant to everything around them all the time, not just what's on the science shelf in a classroom. Could also bring up interesting discussions, e.g. causation vs. correlation. Also, they'd be studying and taking data on a particular location that otherwise isn't. Not relevant to the big picture? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Someone might indeed wish to use the data points at some time in the future, or you may stumble upon surprising results yourself, or find ways that something on campus could be improved. Could be extra cool if you collaborated with other schools in the area or in different parts of the world.
If you want to get all scientific-methody about it, you could have everyone brainstorm a bunch of hypotheses at the start of the year, then see which hold up with the aggregation of all the data collected.
Don't know how well this would go over with very STAY IN YOUR CLASSROOMS high schools, but it's a thought.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
If you offer to buy their beer, they'll come in packs to do whatever you want..... they might even listen too!
One Word:
Explosives.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Could you provide a little more info on the Sterling engine from a bike wheel and rubber bands? I'm a high school physics teacher (done most of what you mention) and I've tried two different hand made Sterling engine models, including the one from Make magazine two years ago or so. Couldn't get either one even close to working.
Yeah, I realize 20 years makes the memory a little hazy.
Here are some high schoolers that made their weather balloon with camera and sensors.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/18/1645216
There are many fields in science but finding what turns on the "light bulb" to get them interested that any field in science.
However, most of the time the "hands on" approach will get most interest because they actually experience what you see in book. Lecture and book knowledge are one thing, getting to do something interesting is another and most kids love to see the action of what they learned from books or heard from the teacher.
I was involved with a club in high school, here's their website. We designed, funded, and built a radio telescope and several people did research projects for science fairs. There is a lot of work that goes into doing real science, but the benefit of a group like this is obvious when you consider how many people in our club went/go on to science/engineering careers.
http://staff.gpschools.org/herrola/RATs/rats2.0/home.htm
Well, if participating in those projects is what you consider "teaching real science", then maybe you should think again. If you are teaching high-school physics, you should be covering ... physics.
I had a wonderful physics teacher when I was in high school, but that seems to be a rare thing (these days, anyway). I'm very disappointed with the assignments my son brings home from his high school senior physics class. I have been teaching him some concepts instead, and many of his classmates tell him that he explains the topics are much better than the teacher!
Having students learn the parts of the eardrum (and take a quiz on it) doesn't really teach them anything about waves and particles. Although I guess if you don't understand it yourself it may be a way to claim to have "covered it". Also, calculating specific heat does *not* require *7 steps* !!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Did anyone else misread the headline of this piece as follows... "How To Get High: Schoolers Involved In Real Science?" ... and imagine a bunch of school kids conducting "science experiments" ;-) ;-) with marijuana?
Organic free-range music... yum!
>Ask yourself, how many people who use a microwave everyday actually understand the principles on which it operates?
I agree, you don't want to teach kids to take things on faith. Which is why I specifically said, "Since I was quite willing to believe the peer-reviewed and much-previously-repeated scientific material at face value...".
When you read that water can be polarized, and you read that it is a reproducible experiment that has been reproduced for a hundred years or so, you can be pretty sure it's not a hoax or an act of faith to believe it.
Many people don't know how a microwave operates. But this does not mean you can't learn how they operate without building one.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Try to find a real research lab, or university group and see if they are interested in working with some students. You might be surprised.
Most scientists are so enthusiastic about their work they will jump at the opportunity to tell somebody about their work and encourage the next generation.
check out this :
http://www.lightsource.ca/education/lloydminster.php
A group of highschool students got to do x-ray analysis of honey to determine chemical composition using a synchrotron lightsource.
Lock the classroom door and cryogenically freeze their heads. Voila. Involved in real science.
You are bitter.
I'm a scientist, and I love my job. There's no job in the world that could be more exciting. Yes, you do have to deal with the administrative side. It's not like a corporate job is any different at that.
Every morning I wake up with a question in my head I want to answer by the end of the day. Nobody is allowed to tell me what to do, I do whatever I find interesting. Sometimes (rarely), I even simply decide to stay in bed, and nobody cares! Tell me of another job like that! Also, I love working with my students: I am surrounded by a group of people who are enthusiastic about questions that I am enthralled by myself. What better working environment could you imagine?
Yes, I could earn an order of magnitude more in a corporate environment. Yes, I waste a lot of time on grant applications and administrative rubbish. Who cares? I love this job. It gives me the chance to spend every single day of my live thinking about problems I care about. I find it awesome that society is willing to pay me money for doing so, and I feel privileged that I am allowed to teach hundreds of students every year, about something that I genuinely find important.
Convert a discarded van into a hitch with solar cells attached to all the side to produce necessary lighting etc. for the converted van. Try if the accumulated energy is used to run air-conditioner in the van. etc.
This will teach physics, engineering, solar technology, aerodynamics, Environmental Science and create a new recycling industry for the discarded minivans as a camping trailer.
...such as those on
I had an idea (I'm absolutely sure it's been done before as it doesn't seem too original, but cool nonetheless) - use a laser level and webcam with some simple software to create a seismic sensor. Suspend the laser level by a string, and point the web cam at a wall. Write a piece of software to look through the picture data and watch how the line moves around, log it to file over time.
One of the best Comp. Sci courses I took in college was assembly. Why? The instructor kept it interesting. Try showing Three Stooges video at the beginning of class and then relate it to the lecture. Happened frequently. You want to keep folks interest to a reasonable degree, keep the content fresh and original. Bill Nye, Captain Planet, Daily Show, etc. Try retrojunk.com if you want to pull some old school commercials out of the hat.
If you want them to get involved in "real" science, let them do "real" things with it. Practical things they would actually get paid for in the "real" world.
Sure you learn a lot from disecting a frog, but I'm still waiting to see a job listing that has frog disection as a skill requirement.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Have you tried giving them Stellarium? If you want to get kids interested in the universe and the tracking of planets and stellar bodies Stellarium is free, works on Linux, Mac and Windows, and with the added star packs you can pretty much check out any object in the sky, and even roll time forward and back thousands of years. Really cool. If you want to give them extra credit you could come up with some questions that will require them to use the software, such as locations of a given star or constellation in a given year, or have them look up how the stars were on the day they were born and have them write about it.
If you shoot me an email to the above address I have a graphic artist buddy that designed a really nice CD/DVD cover for Stellarium which you could use. Just download the program and extra packs and burn it to a CD set or DVD and use the artwork to give them a nice case with it. That is what he did with the students at the local colleges Astronomy club that he has been helping out and according to him they are all using it and loving it. While of course this isn't the same as 11-18 with a little time and imagination you shouldn't have any trouble thinking of ways to engage them with the software. I have used it with a 1GHz Celeron so speed shouldn't be an issue either. Try it, I bet you'll like it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I would consider it unethical to recruit minors to give away their parents electricity, bandwidth, and computing resources for the gain of a third party. If you want to get kids interested in science... you could maybe do some in the classroom?
Let go of the reins (and keep your hand surreptitiously on the bridle) and let the kids explore some of their own interests through a scientific lens. If you allow yourself to appear to be directing the whole thing, it will never be cool.
I always thought a good science course would be taking apart the psudo-science on mythbusters.
You get the entertainment value from the show, then you can re-create some of their experiments in class and have students propose ways the experiments or testing methods could be improved.
I believe the first goal is to teach that science is a process. Give students something to investigate: say sliding friction. Give them limited resources (nothing fancy) and then let them go through the process of investigating the properties of friction. Help them understand errors, how to keep notebooks, how to be truthful, how to work as a team with other student colleagues.
By keeping things simple you don't overwhelmed students and you lay bare the essence of science.
This will take some serious work on your part. Developing a way to grade the students and to work with them will be difficult. But you might really get kids to think about how to investigate what they think they already "know".
They will have to do experiments, they'll have to deal with flakey results (welcome to the real world), they'll have to write about sources of error and they'll have to write a final report and hand it in along with their notebooks. Welcome to science!
If your object is for them to learn, then reinforcing what they've been taught already is a great path. (1) Get them to survey others' understanding of physics principles. (Direct, like at the mall, school or street or indirectly by web site) (2) Get them to develop physics demonstrations suitable for kindergarten students. Select the best and then actually do it as a group. (They'll likely have tried them on neighbors' kids anyway) Keep it simple, safe and positive. Cheers Don Australia
Get them the model rocketry simulation program Rocksim from appogeerockets.com, or some equivalent. You can then have them build and fly virtual rocket models. If you can get permission for an outdoor lab exercise they can then build and fly their rockets to compare actual versus simulated performance. The good news is that Rocksim supports designs with standard low cost rocketry materials, but can also be used for fairly advanced custom projects. There is even a machine shop that will produce custom laser cut fins from Rocksim design files. I've used them before and was quite pleased, as it was a lot easier than shaping them by hand in my garage. Regards, Art
Stanfords F@H project is a great project, and If each student chooses an unique UserId you can track progress based on individual Work Units, ro based on "points" as assigned by the F@H project.
Exactly, in high school I had an engineering physics class, it was two periods long. Each day we had one lecture followed by one lab, we also had 4 group projects during the year. We had a bridge competition, mousetrap race cars, a safety design project and a full size "survivor style" cardboard, duck tape, and trash bag boat race in the schools swimming pool. This class was one of my favorites, and now im a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. If it wasn't for that class I probably wouldn't have been nearly as excited about science.
I think one of the problems with high school science is that it's mostly about learning facts that other scientists have learned. I'm not saying that having a good foundation isn't important, but it doesn't teach students much about the actual process of science, or how to evaluate the claims made in a particular paper - in the realm where new science is being created, you can't always just look up the right answer in the textbook.
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of opportunity for a high-schooler to make a major discovery and get a paper accepted into a journal. However, I can think of two ways to introduce them to peer review system that many real scientists interact with.
1) Have them do the sort of non-glamorous science that everyone wants done but no one has the time to do, such as evaluating products. For instance, verifying that the nutrition information on a food label matches up with the contents, or testing wireless routers to see which one uses the least electricity. They could then post their results on the school district's website, and/or peer-review each other's findings.
2) Obtain a handful of research papers, some of which have been accepted by a major journal or conference, and some of which have been rejected. See if the students can figure out which ones were accepted and which ones were rejected and why.
Over the weekend I had a chance to see several High schools participate in a robotics contest. This is done with the participation of NASA and is a nationwide program.
http://www.usfirst.org/
Video of the event can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgOudjVS18o
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ggEfBeTYYc
You forgot to mention that if you do come up with something valuable, the university or company you work for will profit greatly, but you, more often than not, won't. So you must teach them to function without the profit motive.
If my wife's play style in The Sims 2 is any indication of the sort of science that interests women, then it's Eugenics.
She's the Sims 2 Hitler. It's kind of disturbing.
I'm surprised no one has suggested forensics yet. If you're not able to get the students into an actual lab, its a great way to keep them interested in a physics problem:
- given a ballistic pattern of a bullet OR
- given a blood splatter pattern OR
- a fall OR
- from a position of a body:
determine trajectories, velocities, etc. and likelihood a death is suicide or homicide.
- use momentum to analyze a car crash, or any force-related accident, and reconstruct it.
CSI is popular partly because of physics.
CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
My brother tells a story of a bio grad student who was hired to teach biology for the last half year when the original one quit.
Because he didn't have a teaching degree, they moved all the 'real' students to to the other teacher, and he got all the students who 'needed a science to graduate before they go work in the mill'.
Most of these kids took shop too.
So he walks into his first class after spending all night going through dumpsters in town, gives each kid a large tin can and a mouse trap, with the assignment, "Build a live trap."
They spend the rest of the period brainstorming approaches.
Within a few days he has many live traps.
"What do mice like to eat"
Many answers.
"How could we find out"
Much discussion, but it boils down to, try an equal number with various food and see what you get.
So they do that.
Then he starts looking at where the traps were. And this leads into doubt about the first experiment. Some guys put their traps in the open, others by the wall. Some on the school property, some in their back yard.
More discussion.
More experiments.
Then he asks for what results they got last week. Nobody is writting stuff down. This turns into the importance of record keeping.
Then he asks, " Are you catching the same mouse over and over, or are you catching different mice?"
Whole can of worms about identification. They figure out a way of marking small diameter aluminum tubing and gently crimping it as a bracelet. Now they can tell if a mouse has been caught before.
"How big an area does a mouse forage?"
So they took over wild section of land behind the school, and placed the traps in a fairly even distribution over several acres. Most of the kids had between 6 and 12 traps now, and were visiting them twice a day.
Each kid recorded every mouse they caught, adding a new band when an untagged mouse fell into their clutches.
By this time the weather started getting nasty, as fall gave way to winter.
So the last few weeks to Christmas were spent analyizing the data. So he taught them about averages and means, and standard deviations, and regression testing. (This before calculators. All hand work.)
Remember this is a class that 'can't learn much, we can only hope they will be good with their hands'
Just before Christmas, the school imspector came in to observe. He looked at the neat notebooks, saw the earnest work the kids were doing, had to ask the teacher what a kid was talking about when mentioning mortality tables, and mean forage diameter differential between male and female mice.
The grad student explained.
The school inspector said that he wasn't following the curriculum, spoke to the principal, and had the grad student fired.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
I am in the middle of watching this 3 part show on BBC2 in the UK. This show is exactly the kind of thing you are after. It follows a science teacher and his class as he introduces a project in order to get them interested in science. He uses fireworks as a hook and they follow through chemicals making light, watching a professional display (and helping the organisers) through to creating their own demonstration.
These kids did not like science at all before the project started, but their faces when he was showing them stuff were complete fascination and they were extremely enthusiastic.
The show is available on the BBC iPlayer but I am not sure if this can be used worldwide so you might have to look elsewhere in order to get the show. Hopefully you will get chance to watch this as it should give you some ideas.
The url for the show microsite is http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j5gmk
Organize a working lab for them. They are to decide (within your specified field) what they find interesting and want to learn about. An example from my work, someone noted that the doors on the local Walmart had IN and OUT signs, that some people tended to ignore those, and that the IN and OUT were on opposite sides on the opposite ends of the building. They wanted to know why the sides were different, and depending on the answer, seeing if that answer had anything to do with the first.
Make them responsible for the project by making yourself simply the most knowledgeable member of the lab team. Allow them every source they can think of, including any other teachers or yourself, because when people do real science they're not restricted to the one authority supervising them.
When they pick what to study, help them develop the methodology/design. Describe why you chose one in terms they can understand.
Set them collecting their data, tell them how best to analyze it, and let them go. Provide them with a template of how you want them to produce their results (APA paper format or a poster template).
Let them make their own mistakes and try to correct them. If they ask for help, give it, because you're a lab member too.
I've done this with undergrad labs, including one with 3 high school students among the 8 members. Two went to international conferences, two others got published. They were always done by a 1 hour per week, 16 week lab course, plus the necessary extra time of working in the lab.
Oh, and let them tell you what their part will be. Some are not good at the science, but may be good at the writing. Let them write it up. The point is not to get each to accomplish some pre-determined hoop jumping, but to get the lab as an organization to produce one good result, just like other real labs do.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Science is for the dumb kids.
I work in a big science and tech company and we sponsor quite a number of FIRST teams. The whole structure of the competition is intended to inspire high schoolers in math and science, and the stats are pretty impressive. Yes, it takes money to get started, but depending on your hometown, there may be an outpost of Nasa, Lockheed or BAE or my company that would offer funding and mentors. It genuinely does inspireâ"and help people get jobs. Virginia Commonwealth University and possibly others offers courses in which students mentor teams and get college credit for doing what is effectively community service, but also hones their engineering skills. I know of one engineer who set up an ISO 9001-based quality control system for their team. But there are countless ways this engages kids and gives them a leg up on the competition when it comes to going to college and getting good jobs.
You forgot the bit about the apprenticeship where your ideas are nicked by your supervisor/lead investigator and presented as his own.
Sorry, no time to read everything already posted. Two tried and tested ideas -- maybe for the younger end.
Science notebooks -- encourage students to keep a notebook about all sorts of sciencey things they come across in everyday life. Very easy to review and mark using a sampling system rather than exhaustive reading.
Encourage kids to become the local expert on a topic. Then use them to explain relevant items to the other students.
Students can use these sensors to e.g. study the thermal characteristics of their own home or the school or perhaps a shop or restaurant and correlate them with outside temperature, sunlight, humidity, etc.. Rapid temperature changes can potentially identify inadequate insulation, and temperature fluctuations per se can point to substandard heating control.
You can also build (or buy) a compact solid-state temperature and accelerometer logger and mail those around the country to see what the ambient conditions of mail and parcels are. Once you show that this works, students (even in the range of 14-18) could conceivably land an internship with a local company to introduce a system that tracks conditions of their shipments. You can get USB-key sized temperature and humidity dataloggers for about 60$ from http://www.signatrol.com/ Too expensive for a classroom project perhaps, but potentially very interesting for commercial use.
There are electronic components (for about 2$ apiece) that act as sensors (for e.g. temperature, humidity, air pressure, light, CO2 concentrationt)(see e.g. http://martybugs.net/electronics/tempsensor/ , http://www.tempsensor.net/) .
Attach those to a low-power radio transmitter, and add a transceiver to the USB port of a netbook and you get an interesting wireless sensor network.
Basic ready-made dataloggers can be had for as little as $25 (see http://www.dataq.com/products/startkit/di194rs.htm) and you can get ready made chart display software for them plus APIs in Visual Basic, C++ etc.. They also give away one of those per month, but I consider that a publicity stunt I wouldn't want to expose kids to. An alternative is a microcontroller board can be found for $40 (see http://al-williams.com/app4kit.htm).
Building and testing the sensors from components could be a 1-semester project. Dataloggers are a more complicated proposition, and require some more electronics knowhow, but even that can be done by 15-18 year olds in one semester. Otherwise writing the data-capture software is an option too, but I'd add a full semester for that.
For giving credit I have no other suggestions than to ask for either a final report upon completion or (for additional credit) bi-weekly reports (for preference in Open Office of course, with photographs of the equipment, the measurement setup, and spreadsheet graphs showing the data) for which you provide a template.
I'm a believer in letting students submit bi-weekly progress reports in memo form (so you can see what they're doing, help them where needed, and prevent them from wasting time on dead ends and blind alleys), and then asking them to use these memos when preparing a final report. That way students learn to what progress reports are, why it's important to be able to state clearly what you've done, and how such memos can be used to spread the burden of reporting across the project. Besides which, this is how it's done in professional practice too.
As to the final report: if you provide, say, three templates with varying levels of complexity (from a 2-page leaflet to a full report with problem definition, background physics (with proper references), measurement setup, data description (data in an appendix of course), summary and conclusions, you can provide a different amount of credit for each type of report.
Foldit
Stardust@home - very easy to track progress and classroom materials avaiable.
USFIRST is always a great option
Stick to Newtonian physics. If you show the students in practice and application how something they are familiar with works with the knowledge/theories you have talked about, I think you will strike their curiosity, enthusiasm and understanding. This always works for me as a learner. Measuring pendulum motion is boring. Tie it to something they can relate to. Once they experience and observe this connection, the light bulb will go off for many and the possibilities are endless in their mind. Lastly, it always helps if you bring a element of mild competition into it by structuring the projects into games. What about bottle rockets?
Teach them real orbital mechanics based on Newtonian physics, using Orbiter Space Flight Simulator, available for free at www.orbitersim.com There is a large supporting community and many available addons, including several vessels from the sci-fi genre. You could teach them how ships really fly in space, as opposed to what they see on the movie screen
I dissagree.
I teach Technology Eduction in CT. This is my schools fuel cell car. We have built the whole thing from the ground up, and it teaches real world issues to our students.
http://www.darienps.org/dhsfuelcell/welcome_fin.html
Check it out, maybe we can inspire another school in the country, and we could race! best of luck!
http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/ -- Build your own rudimentary radio telescopes and listen to the radio transmissions from the Clouds of Jupiter. This can be done in many variations, even using discarded mini satellite dishes -- http://www.gb.nrao.edu/epo/ibt.shtml
Soldering experience, electronics, and real science during the school day.
To get someone involved you must first get them 'interested' to get the 'interested' they must see the activity as being a valuable way to use their time. Money is a poor motivator for science, greed makes for poor science and loss of objectivity. Objectivity is valuable, because it is a tool for seeking truth.
Value, truth, interest are all non tangibles that come from a sense of aesthetics or desire to aid others (aka philosophy/religion).
Teach people these things and then show them how science (aka the study of the world) is a useful tool in reaching these goals.
Most people are motivated by relation, and love, they seek to be loved and to love others. That is what we are. Show them where the love is and everything else useful will follow.
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âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Be careful about explosives in today's society. While explosives are what got me into chemistry, they are now very regulated by local, state, and federal governments. Check your local laws (and your administration) regarding definitions of "bombs" and "explosives" before doing them in classroom settings.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
I am female and explosives are what got me into chemistry. Just because girls often shriek or shy from explosives doesn't mean they're actually scared or unimpressed. Most of my female students are more into fire than my male students.
Don't you dare dumb-down (girl-down?) chemistry for girls. We'll give you camo-colored knitting needles if that helps you get over it.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
(simple arithmetic rocks)
you can teach pneumatics, combustion, electricity (firing mechanisms and solenoids), pvc/abs engineering, ballistics, wind speed, velocity, arcs, and as for the extra credit, make them write out their ideas for a cannon pre-internet searching and score them on how different the end result is. you can also score them on the accuracy of predicting the landing spot of the spud.
I thought this article was about something totally different for second there!
But..yeah. I'm all for schoolers and science and experimentation.
FUNK!
Brilliant list. Wish I had done 1/2 of these things when I was 16 in physics class, all memorable and great examples of real pheomena!
I wrote a funding application yesterday, the guy who coaches me included all the real world pzaazz items on it that corresponended with what we are actually doing. Math, Vectors, eigenvalues, statistics, simulations, big papers names blah blah-- sure all necessary and yawn boring! If all that doesn't add up to a microscopic robot, preventing a reactor meltdown, a paradigmatic shift in how the world works, or a telsa coil which shoots aluminum rings, nobody will give a crap. In science when somebody shouts show me the money, they want to see something cool, something new, something that changes their world.
If you are boring, not only will highschool students not care but neither will the rest of the world- and your career will be short and unfruitful. As you grind out the next best min max nonlinear optimizer, for the whoesit-I-never-heard-of-that-and-dont-care-about-it-project you'll wonder which statistics lecture you missed.
There are a lot of way cool things happening in cutting edge research today, look around, if you aren't seeing them, you've got the wrong glasses on.
Study something very close to home. I think the ecology of cracks in the side walk would make a graet topic. Where do nutrients come from? How to weeds compete for them and under what conditions do some win and loose.
Have the weeds evolved to fit this new environment that people craeted only in the last century. Are the wild weeds geneticaly the same as those in urban areas. Theory says evolution can happen with new environments. are we seeing this?
Whatever software it is, make sure it works anywhere they go: on the bus, in the yard, at Church, at the mall, etc.
This is a great site .. kids build cool stuff and show it off to teachers and friends alike! :
they also learn at least the rudiments of programming processors! the kits are cheap and great fun ...
www.nerdkits.com
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
Doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
The team idea in here is good though you will have a few lug nuts who will ride along. :0)
Even in an internet age, physical projects are always stimulating for that age group. Present a set of complex projects that they can build to solve a problem (it is amazing how much high school kids get), help them with problem decomp. and process management (have them pick a manager?), and let them run from there, but enforce a regular set of reviews with you and peers (need to have a method to push the progress). One idea could be to make something to examine some image with a simple web cam, or make a rocket-anything, or build a sim for terraforming mars, etc. Make it big but provide athe message that big approximations are AOK. Designing a small fish/shrimp farm is another good project especially if a team has to make the automated feeders, filter system, temp/chemical monitoring,etc. from simple hardware store parts and controlers. This is the generation that will plant feet on Mars so you may as well get them thinking big
I'm a scientist, and I love my job. There's no job in the world that could be more exciting.
Rock star daredevil astronaut?
Property is theft.
You want to get them doing real science? Talk to your local university and get them summer research positions. Experience with real science is the best way to expose someone to real science.
I'm a physicist. I've mentored a few high school students (sorry, all full for this summer already). Although the background theory is a bit beyond them, the hands on experimental techniques are well within the average high school student's video game honed dexterity. Their eyes are still good, their backs are still good, they're not bitter like most graduate students, and in some cases are more mature.
There is one high school student who has had a paying job all year in my lab because he is very good at making graphene, something many graduate students, postdocs and professors have trouble with.
Look on youtube for hydroxy HHO generator, H2O2 and Brown's gas. Also, check out the Yahoo tech group called "Water Car".
There's tons of info, but many claim to exceed the theoretical maximum. BUT, the bottom line is that they say you can get better water electrolysis by using pulses of DC current instead of continuous. They also try to tie in Tesla and high voltage, high frequency. There is wide spread misconception and lots of snakeoil.... try investigating some of the claims.
Anyway - The Yahoo "water Car" group has info on using an ARM microcontroller to generate the pulses and allow you to change things. You can construct plexiglass "fish tank" like containers and you can build a large toroid coil.
Parts are relatively cheap or DIY. You get physical construction skills, electronic skills, and some chemistry. The gas you make is hydrogen (ie - look for some cool youtube videos on brown's gas torch) and it can make fire.
Finally - efficiency and/or speed of production can be used to measure progress.
You have all of the elements needed to hold interest from a wide variety of students. It also teaches that you should be skeptical is much of the material found on the internet.
This guy has had HS physics students building speakers for years
http://ratch-h.com/
See if you can work out a deal with a local university so that your students can volunteer as test subjects. Lots of universities already use first-year psych students for psychology experiments, and I imagine there is lots of other human research going on as well.
In the studies I was in, the grad student running the experiment would explain the purpose of the study once I'd finished. It was pretty neat to see how the experiments worked from the inside.
As a educator and engineer I found that one of the ways to get kids interested in science, tech, engineering, & Math (STEM) fields is to concentrate on hands on activities, that dont necessairly need calculations and the 'tedius boring' parts of experiments. Many things like trebuchets, mouse trap cars, etc can be built via using imagination and trail & error methods. Granted, the nice thing about this approach is that you can always adjust the activities/challenges to meet the age group, as well as incorporate more traditional science elements (angles, data tables, etc). The main thing is to capture the kids with the fun hook, otherwise they'll see it as just more work. Look into the local universities, many of them have after school programs or can offer curriculum. The STEM departments are a great place to start. Also, your schoold district and county education board will have connections as well. Personally, I belong to MESA (mathematics, engineering, science achievement), there might be one in your area http://mesa.ucop.edu/about/mesausa.html Theres also things like Cosmos http://www.ucop.edu/cosmos/, Avid, and a variety of other programs that have people who do exactly what your looking for on a daily basis. Then theres also the national professional societies that usually have k-12 curriculm/programs, among these are IEEE, SWE, SHPE, NSBE, ASME, ASCE. Lastly don't under estimate local government. Most reasonably sizeable cities have programs that would fit your needs. Even your council members and other elected offcials tend to be well connected and help offer leads as well.
Science is asking a question and figuring out a solution. The best science projects are simple and provide answers to a good question.
Example.
Does Kellogs raisin bran really have more raisins than the store brand?
Very easy to test
How much caffeine is in different drinks
Are people more likely to click on one type of website or another.
I know this is basically marketing research, but that is what REAL science is.
It is asking a question and then finding a way to answer it.
Getting kids excited about science can be quite a challenging task. I have been in the business of getting kids excited about science and electronics for several years now, and we have found the best way to inspire is to show them things that they could actually do (and understand) themselves. Our approach has been to be as thorough as possible as possible in explaining what happens in our projects, while still leaving some room for independent thought and creative thoughts. Striking that fine balance is key. The DIY community on the internet can be a great resource. My suggestion is to just point them at websites and give them credit for "expanding" on any project they find. Make sure you don't just give them credit for copying a project, they have to add something of their own. We have some ideas on our website which tkjtkj mentioned above (mostly microcontroller based) at http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/. A good friend of ours has more mechanical based projects at http://www.crazybuilders.com./ The Make blogs and Sparkfun have some good stuff too, but it tends to be a bit too advanced for the true beginner.
I'm working on a science education project called I2U2, which is looking for teachers like you.
The main idea of the project is to give students (and their teachers) direct access to data from major physics experiments, along with access to grid computing resources so that they can do interesting investigations with those data. We have access to data from the CMS test-beam, as well as Monte Carlo data simulating CMS itself. We will have real data from CMS once the LHC turns on. We have access to environmental data from LIGO, the gravitational wave detection experiment (not the gravitational wave data itself, I'm afraid; but there's still cool things you can do with the seismometers and other sensors). And we have an array of several hundred cosmic ray detectors in place in schools across the US (and a few abroad) from Fermilab's QuarkNet project (http://quarknet.fnal.gov)
All this data can be used for inquiry-driven projects which the students design themselves, with guidance from their teachers and materials we are preparing for the teachers. These 'e-Labs' are not scripted labs (though we do provide a general structure for developing those investigations), they are an opportunity to do real inquiry with real data. And yes, this will include tools to let you track your students' contributions and progress.
We will be doing some teacher workshops this summer, and we need some teachers to be beta testers. If you are interested in that, or in the project in general, check us out at http://www15.i2u2.org/ We are not set up for production yet, so please excuse that it's not very polished, but it should be possible to learn a bit more about the project from that site.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
Part of your issue is that you are equating "real science" with running a cpu sharing program. Try having them build something- almost anything can be used as an exercise. Build a robot- physics, electronics. Model rocket- chemistry, physics, electronics. The list goes on
Students should make up their own experiments and investigate their own questions with teachers/parents as support groups. What's important is encouraging curiosity and a careful, methodical approach to figuring something out. tOM
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
Well now you are on to something.
Engineering projects would indeed be cool. Even if a bridge has been designed before, demonstrating that you can build one is indeed a learning process.
But nearly all of the "projects" or "laboratories" I had in school were not engineering projects, they were exercises. We did not set out to design a new polymer, for example, we simply mixed ingredients the same way they have been done by countless people for decades. We did not build a laser to burn a hole in a billboard, rather we shined one through a diffraction grating as has been done by countless students for years.
So I guess the key element here is: the output should be an original work. That, indeed, would be fun.
Our chemistry labs were so predictable at Georgia Tech we would work them backwards to make sure the numbers we got by experiment were correct. Booooring.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I taught high school physics and chemistry for two years and agree with Terry that the hands on projects are really the ones where students will learn the most. We did a lot of these projects and can give you lots more (building shoes to walk on a field of eggs to study force and pressure, a giant displacement tank to study human density rather than dropping a marble in a graduated cylinder, etc).
I'm now working on my PhD in chemistry and can appreciate your desire for them to do "real science." Now, 3 years into my PhD, I'm just becoming capable of doing that independently. At the high school level, with science fair and other independent projects, the "new" science they're ready to do is variations on problems that are aleady "solved." But they take ownership of it because it's their own data. And if you want to monitor their progress, you have them write up progress reports and have a rubric on which you grade it.
If you want something you can do over the internet that's not just letting calculations occur, the Bugscope is a great outreach project that lets your students send bugs in, then schedule time to look at them with remote control using an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope in the basement of my building:
http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/
I think the biggest problems teachers of the current generation students have is that these students are constantly multitasking. They grew up in an environment where so much is constantly going on in their normal habitat (home, friends house's and so on) that attempting to teach in a normal classroom setting will drive them to utter boredom. These students need to be active on many levels, not just one particular focus. You'll lose them.
Having text ongoing while presenting videos with active listening to get them involved maybe your best bet.
rubber band heat engine + other search resources
Here is an example of the rubber band engine (near the bottom of the page):
http://www.arborsci.com/CoolStuff/cool26.htm
Here is a short video:
http://www.arborsci.com/CoolStuff/RubberBandEngine.mpg
And HERE is a search engine that lets you search 51 physics demonstration websites at once:
http://physicslearning.colorado.edu:9999/vestris/PIRASearchBy.asp ...I hope you and your students have fun!
-- Terry
perhaps try a Mythbusters approach to what they want to believe and what can be supported with science. OR see what they think about science and try to compare it to what science has provided society. Example: cell came from the evolution of physics ideas, there are physicist working to make computers smaller/faster/better, some of the games they play use physics engines. extra
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/birdmonitors.html
In my high school chemistry class we can run folding@home for extra credit as long as we join the school's team. We are assigned credit based on participation and the highest ranked member gets extra points.
The American Association of Variable Star Observers is always looking for volunteers. It's a wonderful hobby for anyone with a telescope (and in many cases, even without one!), and the observations are scientifically useful. The field depends heavily upon amateur observations, because there are way too many variable stars for professional astronomers to observe continuously. It does not take expensive equipment or a college degree. It's not for everyone--it requires patience--but it's edifying for anyone to watch stars change over time.