I lived next to him while I was attending U of I as an undergrad. He was a great neighbor. The house I was in had five bedrooms, all occupied by male college students. He told us we could have parties and be loud, so long as we warned him, and gave him $20 to get a burger and see a movie.
The University of Illinois Department of Physics has a good site for their outreach program, the Physics Van: http://van.physics.illinois.edu/ It's good if kids want to ask questions of professors and students in the department, or read previous answers to questions. It's also good if you or the students want to learn about demonstrations, some of which can be done at home.
Currently, I pay the bills as a graduate student by going to elementary schools to do physics demonstrations on behalf of my department (not at U of I). I don't know where you teach, but there is probably an outreach group nearby (at a University, National Lab, or even a corporation that employs research scientists) that can come to your school. I realize you weren't asking about live demonstrations, and I certainly think you're doing the right thing looking for good, engaging online activities, but I still think this bears mentioning.
Another thought is that because clear and accurate representation of results is so important in science, you might consider doing an activity that involves a computer visualization of some kind of measurement taken by the students. You could even have them publish it on the web. It wouldn't need to be anything super-fancy, just something to encourage creativity and careful thinking about what the results mean and what's important about them.
The fact that they're wrong isn't necessarily important, because they're still *useful*. If you are in a geeky field that involves solving problems, and most of those problems can be solved using techniques governed by very good approximations, such as Ohm's Law or Maxwell's Equations, that seems to me like a good tattoo to get.
Similarly, if you do work with nonlinear devices where Ohm's Law breaks down, why not get a tattoo of the contradiction of Ohm's Law (V != IR)?
You also have to keep in mind that for something about which we know so little, learning more about it will probably lead to applications we haven't even thought of yet. When X-rays were discovered, do you think Roentgen immediately thought of using it for detecting weapons in bags or measuring atomic spacing in crystal latices? Probably not. It could very well be useless, but I expect we will find something useful to do with them if and when we detect them (assuming they exist).
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I lived next to him while I was attending U of I as an undergrad. He was a great neighbor. The house I was in had five bedrooms, all occupied by male college students. He told us we could have parties and be loud, so long as we warned him, and gave him $20 to get a burger and see a movie.
The University of Illinois Department of Physics has a good site for their outreach program, the Physics Van: http://van.physics.illinois.edu/ It's good if kids want to ask questions of professors and students in the department, or read previous answers to questions. It's also good if you or the students want to learn about demonstrations, some of which can be done at home.
Currently, I pay the bills as a graduate student by going to elementary schools to do physics demonstrations on behalf of my department (not at U of I). I don't know where you teach, but there is probably an outreach group nearby (at a University, National Lab, or even a corporation that employs research scientists) that can come to your school. I realize you weren't asking about live demonstrations, and I certainly think you're doing the right thing looking for good, engaging online activities, but I still think this bears mentioning.
Another thought is that because clear and accurate representation of results is so important in science, you might consider doing an activity that involves a computer visualization of some kind of measurement taken by the students. You could even have them publish it on the web. It wouldn't need to be anything super-fancy, just something to encourage creativity and careful thinking about what the results mean and what's important about them.
Good Luck!
The fact that they're wrong isn't necessarily important, because they're still *useful*. If you are in a geeky field that involves solving problems, and most of those problems can be solved using techniques governed by very good approximations, such as Ohm's Law or Maxwell's Equations, that seems to me like a good tattoo to get. Similarly, if you do work with nonlinear devices where Ohm's Law breaks down, why not get a tattoo of the contradiction of Ohm's Law (V != IR)?
You also have to keep in mind that for something about which we know so little, learning more about it will probably lead to applications we haven't even thought of yet. When X-rays were discovered, do you think Roentgen immediately thought of using it for detecting weapons in bags or measuring atomic spacing in crystal latices? Probably not. It could very well be useless, but I expect we will find something useful to do with them if and when we detect them (assuming they exist).