August is 'silly season', so right in the middle of it, a light relief.
images: the ABC of practical work
Just suppose wanted a way of thinking about practical work, and you read a bit of well established, insightful psychology. And that you'd spent some decades watching children crashing on the twin canyon walls of boredom ('We'll just follow the instructions, more or less, and fix our social lives') and anxiety ('I don't know what to do next, or how to do it.') Might there be a navigable channel between these walls?
Well, it was a doodle. How do you think about the challenges of structuring practical work for meaningful engagement?
more reading
Duckworth, A Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance 2016
Kahneman, D Thinking, Fast and Slow 2012
Csikszentmihalyi, M Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience 1990
resonances. RIP mix & burn?
A title freely adapted from the heady days of the arrival of the iPod. The open-source movement has existed for longer than that, alongside open learning movements.
Authoring, including forking, adapting and remixing puts the teachers, who know their children best, in pole position to adapt materials to the classes.
But how? Well, in an optimistic future(and don't we need deep wells to find any of that), it'll be beyond rearranging graphics or the size of bulletproof points or the order of slides in slide decks. Maybe it'll use tools designed for and adapted to the teaching of physics rather than those designed to sell people things they might never realise they wanted.
Maybe try the whole monty, text and interactive graphics, in an interactive notebook.
An isolated adaptable interactive diagram.
Or, a full set of student texts (work in progress):
Source code available here.
In all cases, the medium is the message. No really.
find out more
Notebooks everywhere – search for: iodide, Juypter, starboard, observable
echoes: reversed in time(it is a quantum world)
A forward echo, right here.
'You cannot be serious'.
September will tell– that's the end of the silly season and it'll be here soon enough.
Images, Resonances, Echoes, take 8
I think experiment is fundamental to science. So not teaching experiments is not teaching science. For younger students there are measurement skills they need to be taught, before going on to think about experimental design as they get older. Currently we have too many "verification" experiments in the curriculum. Students should be shown the power of experiment early on, questions asked, experiments designed to provide the outcome. These can be everyday things, they don't have to be complicated. Experiments where students follow recipes should be very limited, the scaffolding removed very quickly. For a definition of experiment see Mayo: https://errorstatistics.com/mayo-publications/ . I would suggest that currently we don't teach enough of the skills needed to allow students to do experiments.