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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.
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.
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 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/
Form a FIRST robotics team. One of their goals is to get a FIRST team in every high school.
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:
Adam Savage (from Mythbusters), wrote an article in Popular Mechanics a few months ago talking about science the US education system.
Pr0n
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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
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.
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
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
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"
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.
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
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.
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
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