I don’t consider myself a creative person unless I have come up with an idea pretty early on.  That’s when I basically run with it and it becomes a pretty extensive and elaborate idea.  In this case, I think I’ve jumped off the deep end with my project idea, but in a good way!  I started off with a general idea of what my Kenan Fellows project was going to be, but now I have a much greater vision for what I want to do with my students.  Will I actually get to do it?  I’m not sure yet.  Here’s the general idea:

My students are going to have to brainstorm what happens when they drop a ball from a fixed height: what types of collisions are occurring? how does energy of the system change? what type of path is the ball following and why?  what would happen if we did ___?

One of the things I learned in my AP Physics I training is that we need to give students an opportunity to observe a physical situation and come to conclusions conceptually based on prior knowledge and understanding of physics.  Once they have discussed their observations, we are going to investigate the mathematics behind the bouncing ball.  We’ll start off small, by completing the calculations of a ball bouncing on the floor: determining the max height of the ball after the first bounce, what the velocity of the ball is when it hits the ground, and how long it took to bounce.  Then we’ll make it a little bit more complicated by saying the ball is no longer bouncing on the stationary floor, but on an oscillating plate!

Once we’ve gotten through the extensive calculations, I’ll introduce the idea of having a computer calculate it for us instead. The students will learn a programming language used in Octave (a free software tool similar to MatLab) to generate data for multiple bounces and multiple bouncing balls. They will be able to command the program to produce data plots and look for patterns among the data. Then they’ll have time to investigate their own questions and ideas and create a poster communicating what they did, what they learned, and why it is important.

That’s the project! I want to go one step further though and this is where I think I may be biting off more than I can chew. These students will be going off to college and will be studying a STEM field which means they will be doing some type of research. I want them to get to experience what it is like to be part of a research conference. They will need to create a poster for a poster session that will be opened up for the entire school, but I don’t just want that. I want to set up a mini “physics research conference”. Each student group will have to dress up and have a professional poster and be ready for questions from their peers and science teachers. They’ll get a catered lunch and there will be a keynote speaker. They’ll have to come to class and register themselves for the conference and get a name tag and a schedule of events and basically do everything you would expect at a full blown research conference! I know…this sounds crazy, but it also sounds amazing! You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have loved to do something like this in high school!