Chemistry visualising problems

 Stereochemistry is very difficult to visualise, even sometimes when playing with models.  Even looking at this, some students couldn't really fathom out handedness and needed to play with the models until they could rationalise their thoughts.

Electricity Revision

 The challenge: Revise all the electricity Topic in 1 hour and carry out 3 required practicals. Easy with the @pascoscientific voltage/current sensor and Capstone, printing out perfect graphs of the results for all the students. All the Demos were done by students. Even I was surprised at the speed we covered all the experiments.

Lascells Cloud Chamber

This is what a cloud chamber should be like. This is the Lascells Cloud Chamber. It is set up in minutes, and after 5 or so minutes, trails from the supplied Thorium welding Rod can be seen, and the students can see the radiation.

 

Centripetal Motion

 Demonstrating that a ball does indeed travel in a straight line when released from the centripetal force The ball travels around the loop until the loop is lifted then it carries on in a straight line. The loop was made from a hoop with insulating foam around it.

Milk decay Experiment

 The milk decay experiment. Most of the students I talked to had no idea what this experiment showed - many had not done it because of a lack of time or resources. It is such an easy experiment to do and get good results.

Exam Diary

 Some of the Students are prepared and ready for this. A few are thinking about starting to revise soon, but most are in between desperately trying to learn all sorts of things and identifying new patterns.

LAMP

 Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP are the essentials for easily making a fully functional web server. This can be created on a Raspberry Pi system in a few minutes and then connected to the internet, and it just works - serving up web pages to the world 

Kipps Aparatus

 One of the most iconic pieces of Chemistry equipment is the Kipps Apparatus. The students are fascinated by how it produces gas at any time it is needed and how, just by turning a tap, the reaction can be stopped and started again.

Momentum

 Investigating Momentum using two @pascoscientific smart carts and a couple of other carts of the same mass. The figures in Capstone clearly showed the relationship in seconds. With the magnetic bumpers on one side and velcro on the other, the idea of elastic collisions and non-elastic collisions was successfully demonstrated.

Templates

When teaching maths, making drawings look right helps the learning process. Using templates makes good-looking images happen fast, and using a visualiser or a tablet and the templates, put these up on the screen so the students know exactly what is happening.

Visualizing Sound waves

 Visualising sound waves using an oscilloscope and then comparing different students' making the same sound gave some insight into just how complex language and sound-making in the mouth are.

Capillary Rise

 Investigating how the bore of a capillary tube affects the height that the water will rise.. As the bore becomes thinner, the water rises more. With very fine capillary tubes, the water rises to almost the top of the equipment. - and Xylem cells are much smaller.

Now where is that stored on an Apple

 A friend bought his old Apple Laptop around, which is running out of space. Our biggest problem was trying to find where things were stored so they could be archived without being restored from the iCloud.

Carbon Structures

Look at the allotropes of Carbon with Molymod structures. From Diamond to Graphite to Graphene to Nanotubes and Fullerenestpo, get an idea of their structure, strengths, and weaknesses.

 

Using a conductivity sensor

 The students used the @pascoscientific wireless conductivity sensor to help test whether the water samples were safe to drink. The meter was used in a range of tests and quickly identified seawater, brackish water, and tap water by their levels of conductivity.

Mechanics The Canon Problem

 Working out the range of a canon on a cliff, firing at an invading fleet of ships. SUVAT comes to the rescue.

Frictionless collisions

 Investigating frictionless collisions with these hover balls. Students were able to investigate hitting one hover into another at different positions to see the angle it made on the other ball.

Root Tip Squashes

Preparing Root tip squashes by breaking down the cell walls then staining the tips and then looking at them under the microscope to see if we can find any stages of mitosis.

 

Spintronics

 Spintronics: Demonstrating how electrics could work in another way to the students. Some find this helpful as another way of looking at the system.

Building a computer

 One of the best ways to learn about the parts and functions of a computer is to build one. Starting with a case, the motherboard is installed along with the processor and RAM then the hard disks and other peripherals are added.

Metal Sulfate Reactions

Comparing predictions with reality. Allowing the students to design their own experiments. Some worked. It took a lot of work to see the results of most reactions that should have worked because of the small amounts used.

 

Fizzy Lemonade equilibrium

I measured and recorded the change in pressure using the @pascoscientific Chemistry sensor of some lemonade poured into a sealed flask. Initially, the pressure increased rapidly, but then as the pressure increased, less CO2 came out of the solution, creating a dynamic equilibrium.

 

Maths and Physics

 Maths and Physics. Should one be advised to take one with the other? The students without Physics struggle with Mechanics, and the Physics struggle without solid Maths knowledge - for them, maybe A-level Further Maths would help.

Measuring Friction

 A Newton spring meter measured the force of friction exerted by some books on a table. It shows how hard someone has to push to overcome friction—unbalanced forces.

Digestive system

 Digestive system revision. A quick look at the woolly digestive system and most of the facts it came back. Good visual aids, especially those that can be touched, help with learning.

Away from Teaching

 It looks like a good day to get on with some reorganisation of the classroom as I can't do much sailing today and the classroom certainly needs a tidy.

Memory

 Different types of memory from 1K chips to 32Gb RAM Modules and much in between. The students learnt how they work and everything about RAM and ROM.

Order of Reactivity

Order of reactivity of metals - this was a tough one for the students because they had to devise their own experiments; with a lot of help, they achieved a result. Next time they have to compare metals and their sulfates prediction and proof.

 

Tension Protractor

 When you need the @pascoscientific tension protractor, nothing is quite like it. The Zipline practical becomes a breeze when you know the force and direction, which are otherwise difficult to calculate or measure.

Sicherman Dice

 These dice have the numbers 1-2-2-3-3-4 and 1-3-4-5-6-8, but give the same sums with the same probabilities as two normal 1-to-6 dice. The only difference is the odd of rolling a double which as usually 6/36 are 4/36 for the Sicherman dice.