Possible Ideas of Physics Investigative Project (1st Edit on 1 June 2014)

I love food and cooking and I love Physics.  I have always wanted to marry the two of them together.  Recently, I have been doing this very wonderful course online in Edx on Food Sciences, and this has brought some inspiration for me to perhaps do this as part of my Physics Investigative Project for my next batch of year 1 students in GATE.

At the school at I teach, we encourage teachers to go beyond the daily formative pen and paper assessments or the termly summative assessments.  To encourage all departments and students to do alternative forms of assessments, each subject will need to have some alternative forms of assessments for students.

For Physics, the tutors all agree that there should be more focus on investigative work that is done by the students and in the meanwhile they can be taught (hm....perhaps not taught....because we don't explicitly teach) scientific reasoning.  We also want the students to get down to planning and doing experiments that are not so "cookbook" style as real investigations are never like that.  Projects are also done in groups to allow students opportunities to work in teams to hone their teamwork skill....hm....though they often hate this part.

Anyway.....back to the story, although we have similar goals in mind, we can never completely agree on what projects are to be done and how they are to carried out.  But for my GATE class because there is only one class and I often take them on their own, I can essentially carry out the projects with great flexibility.

Okay....going further back up, let me not lose track, cause I can be a little long winded at times.....what is this post for?  I have some ideas that I hope to implement for PIP as I am going through my Edx course with Harvard.  So I decided to record them here and so I won't forget.  For those of you who are interested,  feel free to pick up on these ideas or if you think you have something even better, please leave comments.

Project 1 :  Cooking the Perfect Egg
1.  Literature Review : The Science of Cooking an Egg.
2.  Students to investigate the specific heat capacity of an egg.
3.  At the end of the project, they will be given hot water and 4 eggs and they will have cook a perfect soft boil egg (Singapore Breakfast style)
4.They need to explain using sound scientific principles how they are able to attain it.  They have to come up with a general scientific equation on their method such that the equation can allow for cooking of a varying no. of eggs up to 10 eggs and test you their scientific equation).

Misconceptions In Photoelectric Effect

Photoelectric Effect Misconceptions and Questions Asked By Students

  Both my classes started on the photoelectric effect tutorial last Friday.  As the students were presenting their summaries to the rest of the class for one of my classes, one of the girls suddenly turned and asked me, "Why do the photoelectrons emit with different kinetic energy?".  Today, I went into my GATE class and during group discussions, I not only picked up this question from a student to another friend and other question related to the same idea.  Hm....to help me and other teachers who may be teaching the topic, I decided to document them down here. 

  Questions/Comments made by students:

1.  "Why do photoelectrons ejected from the metal with different kinetic energies?"

2.  "So does each electron in the metal have their own workfunction?"

3.  " The electrons are each in a different shell and hence they will require a different energy of emission".

4.  "But we just did line spectra in lecture, so are you saying that the electrons are excited?  And hence at different energies?  But if all the electrons are at ground state then would they be at the same energy level?"

5.  "So workfunction and ionisation energy is the same?  Because they are the minimum amount of energy to liberate an electron? "

I guess what I will do is that I shall flash all these comments on the board for discussion on Wednesday and I guess that should generate some interesting discussions for the class.  :)

Sharing My Classes

This year, one of my class was split up as some of the students were struggling with Physics and we felt that having a dedicated teacher to guide a smaller group would give them the learning structure and allow for greater differentiated learning within the class and hopefully build more self-confidence in them.

Am I enjoying it?  Definitely!  Actually, I am feeling the benefits of it myself and it is extra benefits that I would not have reaped.  I did have split classes before, but this time it is a different.  Maybe it has to do with the fact that both us have busy schedules and ended up half the time, we still took each other half classes and relieved each other.

What ended up was that we had to keep communicating to each other what each of doing.  We then went in to prepare the labs together, talked more about how to teach the class and what each wanted to do :)  Haha....we had more synergy!

This was really a pleasant surprise.