Awesome Day

Today I hopped out of bed, put on my comfy pants and one of my favorite shirts and my yellow sunshine necklace from NovaDesigns, and immediately solved a problem that has been bugging me for several years.

My comfy pants (Gramicci cotton pants with a built-in belt) are one of those items of clothing that I wear to school (we can “dress down” on Fridays if we contribute toward a fund benefiting needy students in the district) that have no belt loops.  A lot of these clothing items are skirts, but a couple are pants.  And the thing is, I like to hang my keys from my front right belt loop using a mini-carabiner.  If I have no belt loops, I hang them from a lanyard around my neck instead, and that is less desirable for two reasons: one, the keys swing in resonance with my step frequency so if I am walking anywhere I have to hold the keys anyway or else they swing wildly after a short time; and two, they weigh me down and make my neck hurt.

So this morning at about 5:30 AM  I realized that if I take a loop of twill tape and pin it to the inside of the pants in front and on the right side, I can pull it out of my pants to hold my keys, and tuck it into my pants on weekends or other times when I don’t carry my school keys!  You would think such a simple solution would have been obvious long ago.  Ah well, my next sewing project will be sewing the twill tape loops into pants and skirts!

But that was only the beginning!

I had students come to my class before homeroom to do work and get help!  Usually my conceptual-level kids just don’t care that much about their grade and don’t mind that much if they don’t understand something.  But this year there is something different in the atmosphere.  Another teacher I spoke to yesterday said she noticed it too.  There is a collective seriousness towards studying this year among the kids.  The other teacher speculated that word had gotten around that colleges are much harder to get into than they used to be, so you have to have better grades to get into less-competitive schools nowadays.  I don’t know that high school students generally think that far ahead.  And it is hard for me to believe that the president’s speech to kids really made THAT much of an impact.  Whatever it is, I am glad of it.  I love my classes so far.  My largest class has 20 students (!!!) and so far they mostly seem to be paying attention and trying to do the work and understand things.

Speaking of which, I had the BEST class first period today.  Well, all my other classes went well too.  But after first period, I was just flying.  We’re doing basic, beginning physics stuff–relating the slope on a position-vs-time graph to the velocity of an object, talking about having a frame of reference and a defined “start” or “zero” position, and the difference between graphs for things moving away from zero and things moving towards zero.  But I felt like everything went right, I was asking the right questions to bring the kids to realize what it would mean if two object’s graphs had the same slope, or how to tell by eyeballing the graph which of two objects is moving faster.  I asked questions, and then I asked the kids who answered how they knew they had the answer, and they explained it to me!

My other conceptual-level classes went well too, though I was a little giddy by 6th period and those kids clearly wondered what I’d been taking…nothing other than usual, I swear!  (actually, I forgot to take my usual vitamins, antihistamine, and anxiety meds this morning.  Oops!)  And then it came to my AP class.

Ah, my AP class.  Nice kids.  And one of them got into a giggle fit when I was jokingly suggesting reasons my random drawing of lab groups came out the way it did.  We were doing a projectile launch lab today.  It quickly became clear that goggles were a necessity!

This evening, I got to watch one of the funniest movies ever on TV, without commercials.  The Birdcage, with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.  In case you haven’t seen it, it hilarious, and it is based on La Cage aux Folles, a French film that I am pretty sure my parents took me to see when I was a kid.  I remember that I liked La Cage aux Folles, but I don’t remember anything else about it.

Could a day get any better?  Yes, it would have been better if the music played over the PA system this morning had been better.  Every morning the kids come up with music to play over the school system for about 10 minutes before homeroom officially begins.  Today’s music sounded like awful incomprehensible anime theme songs, and then they played Sandstorm.  Without that, it would have been a perfect day.  Instead, it was only awesome.

;-)

I love my job!

Fermilab-CERN rivalry

There is a rivalry of sorts between Fermilab, in the US, and CERN, in Switzerland.  Both laboratories are racing to detect the Higgs boson, and last year the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was completed at CERN.  Last summer, a video of the LHC Rap was posted on YouTube, to the delight of physics teachers everywhere.

Fermilab is finally making a countermove, having asked funky49 “the Rapbassador” to create a rap for Fermilab.  I’ll link to the video when it is available.

April was two months ago

Waaay back in April, I attended a local physics teachers’ meeting that I helped organize.  It was definitely one of the best such meetings we’ve had in years, though I must say we do a good job on meetings.  I don’t recall a bad speaker that we’ve had or bad food.

Our Friday evening we hosted a local top physics student and his physics teacher, part of our new outreach initiative.  We enjoyed a catered meal with adorable tiny and multitudinous desserts…oof.  Thank goodness for the exercise class I started taking at school!  Then we walked to the building next door and listened to University of Pennsylvania professor Ken Lande, who amazed us and grabbed us with his energy talk.  He’s nearly as good as Al Bartlett – certainly he is as alarming.  I started thinking about what I can do to help save the world.  (Follow the Al Bartlett link and watch his talk – I highly recommend it)

Saturday we had a talk by my NCSU professor, Bruce Sherwood.  He’s the one who taught me to use vpython and completely changed my view of introductory physics.  I’ve been promoting vpython with the local physics teachers and Bruce’s talk was very well received.

There were some short talks by members of the group and a business meeting at which I was elected “Corresponding Secretery” which means I took over the mailing responsibilities and I now write a bi-weekly newsletter.  But after lunch, we had an awesome experience:

Ollie brought members of the Eastern Electric Vehicle Club (EEVC) and their cars to explain electric cars, answer our questions, and show off their work!  I was impressed by the plug-in vehicles made by modding existing vehicles.  There was a guy with a  Ford 150 pickup truck that he converted to a plug-in gas-electric hybrid, a woman with a student-modified van, a guy with a Geo Metro convertible (link gives specs) turned into a purely-plug-in electric vehicle, and more!  Here’s the workings of the Metro:

under the hood

in the trunk

The acceleration on these electric cars is very exciting – lots of delta v in a short delta t!  It comes from having a powerful electric motor and a low mass that needs to get moved.  The Metro got towed to the meeting behind a sexy sportscar, that’s how light it is.

Here is Ollie in a car converted to electric by high school students:

Ollie let us drive this car around the parking lot, and that was pretty cool too!  Those extra guages on the dashboard show the voltage across the batteries and the current drawn by the engine.  Multiply the two values together, and you will get the power in watts.  746 watts is 1 horsepower.  Mostly, you wouldn’t multiply while driving though…but you have to keep track of the voltage or you could find yourself stranded without enough “juice.”

I had a great time!  I am itching to find some crappy used car in decent shape, rip out the insides, and make an electric car for runs to the grocery store or whatever.  Yet another thing to put in the “future projects” file…

Digital

I have so many posts to write, and I keep not writing them.  In the meantime, you can see the videos I made at Hershey Park at our annual physics field trip.  I put them on YouTube, where I now have my own “channel” at

http://www.youtube.com/user/WCEastFZX

Here is one of my videos:

Also at AAPT

Rhett A.

Going to the AAPT conference wasn’t all about my photo with Connie Willis.  One of the best things about the conference is meeting and talking to all sorts of interesting people who are doing interesting things.  I talked to some high school students who were presenting a poster on water purification, for example.  I spoke with a woman who has been teaching kids to program some optics simulations using vpython.  I learned about making stop-motion animation from Brian Gravel, of the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach.  You can read Rhett’s post about the software, SAM animation, at Dot Physics.  I learned about video labs from a high school teacher who works with a Rutgers University professor.  Dave Vernier of Vernier Software showed me how to use my LabPro equipment and a voltage probe to generate sine waves.  And I had a great talk with Rhett from Dot Physics after a session on “clickers,” at which Stephanie Chasteen presented a talk.  Stephanie is ScienceGeekGirl, and we had a good talk about technology and education over lunch on Saturday.

Stephanie C.

So the next step is following up on some of these conversations.  I have some slips of paper covered with URL’s (that’s website addresses) to investigate (not sure where those are right now…), a small pack of business cards, and some sticky notes from WebAssign that I have a few notes written on.  Somehow I missed getting the contact information from the Department of Energy woman I talked to, but I might be able to find her another way.  I also still have a business card from last year’s winter meeting, in Baltimore, which I still have not followed up.

Well, that is the way things go.  Here I am, blogging about these people but not contacting them, and I will now go and finish grading a batch of tests I have, but I won’t send e-mails tonight.  Maybe this weekend I will do that.  Maybe.

By the way, did you notice?  Stephanie is wearing a shirt from xkcd!

Opportunity

One of the things I love about attending conferences is the chance to meet people and have great conversations. Then there are just those who I get to meet. I got to meet Paul Hewitt several years ago at a conference, and I got to tell him that I knew a woman who had taken his physics course and majored in physics because of him. I got to make him smile.

Paul Hewitt is the author of a physics textbook called Conceptual Physics. We use it at my school for the lowest level of first year physics, and I also have AP students read it. Many physics teachers admire Paul Hewitt very much, so it is actually pretty cool to have met him. I can also impress my students by recounting how I heard a talk by S. James Gates, who to my students is “the guy on the poster.” I’m not sure why it is so exciting to have seen in person a guy on a poster, but OK.

Well, this conference is the one where I got to have my picture taken with Connie Willis, one of my favorite authors! Woot! She even gave me permission to put the photo on my blog, so here it is:

When I was in high school, I first read Willis’s novelette Blued Moon, which was published in Asimov’s* (a magazine of short science fiction stories) in the 1980’s. I loved it, and thought that even my mother would enjoy it. My mom said she didn’t like science fiction, but this was a story about coincidence, language, and English majors.

Since then, I have read every book and story by Connie Willis that I have been able to find. I learned that he husband was a physics professor somehow, which made a lot of sense when I read At the Rialto and her novel Bellwether. At the Rialto is a short story that takes place at a quantum mechanics conference, and Bellwether involves someone who keeps alive the memory of her high school physics teacher.

I met Connie’s husband Courtney Willis at a conference in Madison, WI. I was heading out to find dinner one evening with my friend Liz, and Courtney was also on the same mission. We all found our way to an Afghan restaurant and had a good meal and a good conversation. Then a year or so ago I finally met Connie Willis when she gave a talk and a reading at Swarthmore College. She had a bad cold at the time, but she did the reading anyway and I hung on every word, and afterward asked her to sign my copy of her novel Passage.  The novel she read from that night will probably be published next spring (2010) and I am very much looking forward to reading it! It takes place largely in her favorite time and place: World War II, the Blitz. It features characters who are time-traveling historians, as in her short story Fire Watch and her novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog.

So, I still haven’t had a true conversation with Connie Willis, but I am still pretty pleased to have had several opportunities to say hello at the conference, and feel all glowy that I was at the same conference as Connie Willis. I also stayed at the same hotel Al Gore spoke in, in the same city where President Obama was spending the weekend, and I was in the same room as a Nobel-prize-winning physicist more than once! So I guess it was a pretty special weekend, but I still missed my husband and our cat. I’m glad to be home!

*short for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

Me time

Well, I am just about ready to head for Chicago, hopefully on an earlier flight than planned by going standby.  So it will be a fairly long period of sitting and waiting in and on public transportation today.  I’ll be attending the AAPT winter meeting this weekend, learning stuff and hanging out with some of my favorite kinds of people: physics teachers!

I’m hoping to run into sciencegeekgirl and the dotPhysics blogger, meet the wife of my distance learning professor of the past year, have chats with some old acquaintances from various parts of the country, and also learn stuff about teaching physics.   There will be sessions on pedagogy, innovative labs/activities, uses for new technologies in the classroom, research on how to teach physics so that people learn it well, and current research/theories/news.  Nobelist George Smoot will give a talk, and so will pioneering astrophysicist Vera Rubin, who discovered that dark matter has to exist.  Since the AAPT meeting is being run in conjunction with the meeting of the AAAS, I might go to some of their sessions as well.  I’ve been told Al Gore will be speaking. (It’ll be today and I don’t think I’ll go, but I might…)

I’m off to finish packing and catch a train to the airport!  Buzz will keep my husband company until Monday night.

December catch-up and a lesson

Wow, I sure haven’t posted much this month.  It’ll be the worst month in the short history of this blog if I don’t work hard to catch up.

What do you know…I’ve been busy!  We had another Physics Olympics meet in December, but I did not host it at my school.  I just had to get a team of kids ready to compete!  Also, my online graduate course ended, and I had to take a final exam.  I’ve started a team of 7 kids on a competition called Real World Design Challenge, which is sponsored by the Department of Energy, and I spent a bunch of time on e-mailing and setting up accounts and installing software, etc.  Plus there was all that shopping and wrapping to do, and I even managed to go out twice!

Unfortunately, I have also wasted an inordinate amount of time on Facebook, updating my status and checking up on former students who spent much of December using their Facebook status to count down the days until they were on break (generally about a week before I was going to be on break, of course).  Several of them came to visit at school during the last three days before my break began, and I got to explain to some of my former AP physics students what I learned this semester about Newton’s 3rd Law of motion.  Namely, that it isn’t true.

(This is where you gasp.  Or gape.  Now shut your mouth and keep reading.)

I’m not kidding.  That whole thing about “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction…”  you know what I mean, right?  What it is supposed to mean is that when one object exerts a force on another object by interacting with it, the object exerting a force also experiences a force, and it’s the same amount of force but in the opposite direction.  So if I run into the wall, the wall runs into me.  If I push down on the floor, the floor pushes up on me.  These forces are electrical in nature: the electrons in me are repelled by the electrons in the wall, to such an extent that my atoms never even get close to the wall’s atoms (on the atomic scale) and I just bounce right off the wall.  If I am injured and the wall isn’t, that’s simply because I am squishier than the wall.  That’s an example of Newton’s 3rd Law working as expected.

However, let’s look at when this doesn’t work: in certain cases of the magnetic force between moving charged particles.  First, you need to understand a few things.  Magnetic fields are created by moving charged particles (like electrons moving inside atoms) and only interact with moving charged particles.  Any moving charged particle makes a magnetic field.  The earth’s magnetic field is created by moving charged particles in the earth’s core.  The magnetic field of a refrigerator magnet is caused by electrons in large clumps of atoms that are all moving in similar ways, so that their tiny magnetic fields all add up to make one strong enough to defy gravity and hold bits of paper to your refrigerator.

So if a moving charged particle gets into a magnetic field, it experiences a magnetic force that happens to be perpendicular to both the direction the particle is moving in and the direction the magnetic field is pointing.  Direction the field is pointing?  Yep, if you have a bar magnet filled with electrons moving in atoms such that they are adding up all their fields, the field has a direction.  It points away from the magnet at the “North” pole and it points toward the magnet at the “South” pole and alongside the magnet it points in the opposite direction from the way it points at the ends.  It is this directionality of the field that allows a compass needle to point toward the North pole of the earth, enabling you to do your orienteering or navigating or whatever.

So, the moving charged particle moves into the field, and it experiences a force to the side (compared to the way it was moving) because of that perpendicular business.  The field was created by another moving charged particle.  Does that particle experience an equal and opposite force?

NO.

In this example, the positive particle is moving to the left and the negative charged particle is moving down.  At a certain instant in time, the two particles are exactly above one another as shown.  The negative charged particle is in the field produced by the moving positive particle, and experiences a force to the right.  The positive charged particle is directly behind the negative charged particle, and in this location there is no magnetic field from the moving negative particle.  No magnetic field, no magnetic force on the positive particle, and goodbye Newton’s 3rd Law!

So I hope you enjoyed this little physics lesson, and maybe I will treat you to another one sometime!

Darrell is my new best friend

This is the long-awaited post on the Physics Olympics meet at my school.  My team came in 6th out of eight teams (we were expecting nine teams, actually) but I had a lot of kids participate and most of them had fun!

As the host, I kicked things off.  As you can see from the photo, I wore a hat.  The day was pretty warm, so I wore a straw hat.  I always wear some sort of hat, because it makes me identifiable.  Instead of “the dark-haired lady in the glasses and the red shirt,” I am “the lady in the hat.”  This works at Science Olympiad as well.  Since I had written two of the problem-solving problems each team got, they could ask me questions about my problems.  They just had to find the lady in the hat.

We had two build-ahead events: mousetrap boat and toothpick egg-toss.  Both were great fun, but they also both had their own logistical problems.

Mousetrap boat was the first event of the day.  We had to set up two long troughs of water, with plastic on the floor (we were in the school gym, which is still fairly new) and some tables and chairs, and all the boats had to be checked to make sure they qualified under the rules of the event.  Then, teams of two or three for each boat would come up, launch their boat down one trough by burning through a string holding the mousetrap in the “ready” position.  They collected their boat at the end (if it made it) and re-set it under a time limit to run down the other trough.  The times were added for the total score.

My kids had been building their boats in class and tested them two days before the meet.  Only a couple of the boats were able to make it all the way from one end to the other, from our school, so those were the only boats from our school that competed.  I was pleased that we made 4th place overall!

After the boat races, I had some students in the main office announcing the rotation events over the PA system.  For 25 minutes at a time, teams of students from each school were shut in classrooms to compete in “penny barge,” “mystery lab,” and “paper clip tower.”  A limited number of kids are allowed in the room, and parents who have been trained by teacher coaches the hour before judge the results.  We had 8 rooms operating at any given time, with 2-5 parents in each.  It’s a pretty big operation.

The “penny barge” is an event where a team gets a single square of Reynold’s brand aluminum foil and a big pile of wet pennies.  They have to fold or otherwise shape the foil into a boat or barge, float it in a big tub of water, and start loading it up with pennies.  Students can dry the pennies if they wish, but they have to bring their own towels.  Once the boat sinks, the pennies are counted by loading them onto an angle-iron and measuring the “height” of the stack.  The tallest stack of pennies wins!

The mystery lab was based on projectile motion, and students had to predict where a projectile would land when launched from the same launching device at two different angles.  My kids did terribly at that…we had not practiced it, and practice is key.

The paper clip tower was an event where kids had 10 rubber bands, a box of paper clips, and 15 cm of masking tape, and had to build the tallest possible tower.  They could bring in pens, pencils, rulers, scissors, pliers, and craft knives, but no plans or photos.  They had to get their towers measured before the 25 minutes were up, which my team did not manage to do: a strategy problem.

Once the 25-minute events were over, the teams had to hand in their problems back in the gym, where the mousetrap boat group had dismantled their area and the egg-toss team had set up a different one.  This one was a plastic-covered section of floor that was covered with sheets of newspaper, surrounded by a border of swimming-pool noodles, and with a high-jump device mounted on one side.  Students had to toss their toothpick-and-glue device underhanded to get it over the two meter high string without touching the string.  Then it had to land in the landing area without breaking the egg inside the device.  The lightest successful device is the winner.

This was an odd event for us.  One of the devices we’d tested successfully in school failed the real event, and another device we’d tested unsuccessfully in school did very well and got a good score!  We came in 5th place.

So, why is Darrell my new best friend?  Darrell is the custodian who was assigned to work the event.  He unlocked doors; granted access to the custodial closet for the mousetrap boat set-up team, who arrived an hour ahead of everyone else; got us into the concession stand in the gym lobby; and provided lots of tables and rolling trash cans.  Darrell set up and tested the gym’s PA system, got the bleachers out for us, kept track of kids wandering around the building where they didn’t belong, and smiled the whole time.

In addition, the week before the event, I talked with Darrell several times as other coaches called or e-mailed with requests.  He assured me that all would go well, made suggestions, and calmed my nerves.  He spent time in my room after school to go over the details, watched over the facilities and provided extra paper towels.  Darrell was the best.  Other coaches also commented on how smoothly the event ran.  Things started and ended on time, and we were all cleaned up and out of the gym exactly on schedule.

It was fantastic, and I am very glad that I probably won’t have to host another meet for another two years.  I slept all afternoon afterward!

Thank you very much to RW for the photos, to all the coaches and parent volunteers for making the events run, and to Darrell!

Physicists can make anything physics

The last time I talked with my mom, she said she’d stopped checking my blog because I wasn’t posting anymore.  Well it is true that my posts are becoming rare as I am swamped with school.  Plus I have already had two colds this month, which is in my opinion very unfair.  It is usual for me to have a cold this time of year, just in time for the local physics teachers’ fall demo night, when we get together on a Friday evening and share cool stuff we do.  It’s coming up this Friday.

I do plan to go to the demo night, and I’ll show off some vPython stuff and pitch the graduate course I’m taking that I posted about before.  Speaking of which, I just finished taking, scanning, and e-mailing the second test of the semester, and I am going to go to bed as soon as I finish writing this!

Meanwhile, I wanted to point out that the blogroll to the right has been changing, as I’ve been discovering blogs that are very cool.  I haven’t added a link to Twisted Physics, but I might, and I plan to put the blogger’s book The Physics of the Buffyverse on my summer reading list for 2009—seeing as I am a fan of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I usually have time to read in the summers.

Monday, Twisted Physics posted a video (see below) of a couple of MIT professors performing a song about special and general relativity.  Good physics, lots of real equations, but really long and set to a very recognizable tune that I’m pretty sure they don’t have the rights to.  If you are interested in physics songs (you must be, isn’t everyone?  I sure am!) then I recommend looking up Haverford College’s Walter Smith.  He was kind enough to perform at our local physics teachers’ Spring Meeting a year and a half ago, and his song Ampere’s Law has been recorded by the band Broadside Electric on their Live: Do Not Immerse album.

By the way, all the lyrics to the song are posted at Science After Sunclipse.  The “8.033″ refers to the number of the class—you know, those nerds at MIT have a number for everything.