Past projects 1
Make Physical Learning Great Again
Funded Jan 31, 2022
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The pandemic has deprived my students of tactile learning. When we were in an online school, they were suddenly expected to learn solely through a computer interface, which proved far less than ideal for most of them. Then last year, when we were expected to social distance, even to the point where I sometimes only saw students once a week, students were deprived of physical proximity and social interaction that I believe they need for their development. Now that students are fully back in person, I want to help them learn the physical processes involved in science rather than just theoretical situations about how it works. While I have some lab supplies from previous teachers, much of it is broken, and/or we don't have enough for the students to all participate using them. It's a hefty price to buy lab supplies and replace unusable apparatus, so even $1000 worth of supplies would help us to get enough supplies to make a dent in how much we actually need to do. The force tables would help students to understand net force and component forces in a physical way and help them learn to take data. The Multiple String Vibrators would help students to visualize how waves work in real life as well as how they can modify different physical qualities to influence the wavelength and wave speed of different materials. The Sympathetic-Differential Tuning forks will give me a model to make my own resonator boxes, or at the very least, try out the apparatus to see if I would like to buy more for my students. Resonance is a beautiful part of how waves work that also informs noise-canceling headphones, musical instruments, and other parts of the kids' daily lives, so having a way for them to investigate this phenomenon carefully is awesome.