As I mentioned in my previous post, the STARBASE Team was determined to create, or at least conserve, better practices as we moved to remote learning for the spring of 2020. We decided to start by making use of PhET Simulations. I’ve been a fan of PhET Simulations for a long time and have used them for college as well as middle and elementary classes. They allow teachers to provide an authentic setting for students to explore real phenomenon and make interpretations. They may appear to be games but, as they replicate aspects of how the world works, they are simulations.
For our approach, we emphasized pattern recognition and generalizing patterns into a rule. Using the Forces and Motion: Basics Sim, we first asked the students to observe what happens with tug of wars under different pulling scenarios. Most students were able to generalize their observations into rules that were essentially Newton’s Laws. Next, we showed students a part of the simulation that involved a robot pushing a frictionless cart with various mass objects on top. We challenged the students to find the mass of a mystery package by finding patterns in how the robot-cart acted under different circumstances.
I was truly impressed by how many students pulled this off and how much diligence they put into it. As an example, here’s a series of pictures with notes from one of the students. You can see that the student ran several scenarios with the robot-cart and wrote down the data. He noticed the patterns. He generalized, or at least extended the patterns, such that he could find the mass of the mystery package.
The STARBASE Team put a lot of thought into these early remote efforts but I can not say enough about the effort put in by the students and the dedicated support we received from the district teachers and administration. It was a great experience and a great start to a challenging year.