It's been an amazing two weeks. After decades in the classroom, I find myself back in a university physics lab, trying to remember how to work an oscilloscope and learning about new tools for measuring the basics like voltage and current. I am part of a team of researchers including a graduate student and an undergrad student in ECE, as well as two rising juniors from the high school where I teach. Because I don't know much more about the research than the students, I am learning with them rather than being seen as the expert. Wouldn't it be cool if students in all of my classes learned from each other and learned on their own as much or more than they learned from me? I hope to develop techniques for encouraging students to pursue their own questions, rather than always feeling that I need to be in control.If I build the lab experiences in my physics classes with a progression in mind, I might take more of a lead role in the beginning but then wouldn't it be cool if I became comfortable with relinquishing that role and transitioned into more of a guide. It's been good to take on the role of experimenter rather than just experimental designer. I've been pondering how students in my classes should show what they've been experimenting on. In the past I have asked students to organize their labwork in a number of ways — they have used notebooks to collect and analyze their data, or notebooks that just held group data. Other years I had them print formal lab reports or submit electronically through Google Classroom. For next year, I have a Google Sites organization ready to go and based on my attempts at research I hope this will be better. I'm finding that I need a hybrid of methods — sometimes I scribble notes or sketch an apparatus, sometimes I want to link to an online source or image, sometimes I want to include a spreadsheet or graph, sometimes I need to work through calculations by hand rather than using the formality of an online editor. I'm hoping that the Google Sites plan will allow flexibility while still guiding students in their organizational habits. With a bit more freedom as the year moves on, they can develop a style that works for them.
Part of our research project involves working with an arduino. I started with the SparkFun Inventor's Kit, working through the detailed tutorials — here's my RGB LED experiment. This has inspired me as I consider adding Genius Hour or 20% time to my course. Although I'm excited about communicating to students that their questions are just as important as the questions in our official curriculum, I'm not sure that beginning the year by saying — decide a topic or project you want to learn about and I'll provide class time to do it — would really work. Now I'm thinking that we will start with a 4-week project using arduinos, where there would be some suggested goals at the beginning (probably leaning heavily on the Inventor's Kit) but wouldn't it be cool if students took things in a unique direction that I had never anticipated? After the 4 weeks, students could continue with an offshoot of their project or move in a completely different direction entirely.
Our project goal for the summer is to build a drone from scratch that can be controlled using an iPhone. One of the students has moved ahead on some of the control steps, as he has some earlier experience with arduinos. He can control the motor using the arduino and is beginning to connect through bluetooth. This just proves to me how letting different students have different goals can work.
The next step in our project is to build a test frame to measure thrust versus motor speed and continue the design process: use the data to design the structure of the drone, decide on a battery that can be lifted but provide the necessary power, put it all together, and fly!
This is cool...
