Friday 26 April 2024
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.
Thursday 25 April 2024
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.
Wednesday 24 April 2024
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.
Tuesday 23 April 2024
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.
Monday 22 April 2024
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.
Sunday 21 April 2024
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.
Saturday 20 April 2024
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
Friday 19 April 2024
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.
Thursday 18 April 2024
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.
Wednesday 17 April 2024
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.
Tuesday 16 April 2024
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.
Monday 15 April 2024
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.
Sunday 14 April 2024
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.
Saturday 13 April 2024
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.
Thursday 11 April 2024
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.
Wednesday 10 April 2024
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.
Tuesday 9 April 2024
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.
Monday 8 April 2024
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.
Sunday 7 April 2024
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.
Saturday 6 April 2024
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.
Friday 5 April 2024
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.
Thursday 4 April 2024
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.
Wednesday 3 April 2024
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.
Tuesday 2 April 2024
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.
Monday 1 April 2024
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.
Sunday 31 March 2024
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.
Saturday 30 March 2024
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.
Friday 29 March 2024
Order of Reactivity
Thursday 28 March 2024
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.
Wednesday 27 March 2024
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.
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Chemistry visualising problems
Stereochemistry is very difficult to visualise, even sometimes when playing with models. Even looking at this, some students couldn't...
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Negative feedback is a difficult concept to try and get over so I tried using a balance board and the @pascoscientific smart cart strapped...
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Getting a classic set of results for the titration of NaOH and HCl is not that difficult but it is nice when we can get students to this ...
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Mechanics: the grand meeting of Maths & Physics! Using strobe light & a ball drop for gravity-acceleration calculations and SUVAT fo...