Workshop Details - Spring 2003 meeting of ISAAPT

Workshops W1 and W2 will be held Friday morning, April 11, 2003

Workshop W1 (9:00 - noon). "Teaching Buoyancy and Optics Using Inquiry", Carl J. Wenning, Illinois State University, Normal, IL. High school teachers will participate in one or two highly detailed laboratory activities that model how best to conduct inquiry in the high school physics setting. Activities will be taken from the areas of buoyancy and optics. Special attention will be paid to inquiry-oriented student performance objectives, and how they might be implemented in the lab setting. Special attention on how to involve students with disabilities will also be included in this workshop.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide teachers with information and stimulating experiences that will allow them to conduct inquiry-oriented laboratory activities in their classrooms in such a way as to engage all students.

Workshop W2 (10:00 - noon). "Junk Box Wars", Christopher LaRoche, Sherrard High School, Sherrard, IL. High school teachers will compete to develop from materials provided a small catapult, the purpose of which is to launch a projectile at a "castle" located X meters distant. Judging will occur immediately following the Friday night banquet, or on Saturday morning. A prize will be awarded. Special attention on how to involve students with disabilities will also be included in this workshop.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide teachers with information and experiences that will allow them to infuse technological activities and design into their teaching, thereby relating to the study of physics to real-world problems.

Workshops W3 and W4 will be held Saturday morning, April 12, 2003

March, 26, 2003. Note: This workshop has been cancelled. Tim Stelzer will be giving a colloquium in New York. The backup workshop leader, Gary Gladding, will be attending a meeting in Washington, DC. They sincerely apologize for this late cancellation.
Workshop W3 (9:00 - 11:00). “Tycho: Enhancing Your Course with Web Technology”, Tim Stelzer, Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Tycho is a powerful computer package which will enable you to put as much (or as little) of your course online as necessary to maximize your students' learning. Tycho has two main components, a grade book, and homework drivers. The grade book provides both students and instructor with secure access to their progress in the course from any Web-enabled browser. The homework drivers allow the instructor to choose from a large variety of exercises ranging from sophisticated Interactive Examples to traditional homework problems to surveys for Just-In-Time teaching.

Tycho is available free of charge, and many Illinois schools have already incorporated it into their physics courses. In this workshop we will give you a brief tour of Tycho, as both a student and an instructor, to help you determine if it's right for your class.

Workshop W4 (9:00 - noon). "Simple Experiments in Physics", Thomas Kuhn, Midwest Educational Representative, Pasco Scientific. High school teachers participate in hands-on laboratory activities doing experiments that can be done in a high school science lab. PASCO will provide apparatus, interfaces and sensors to do the following:

Measure the Speed of Sound
Measure g
Verify Newton's 2nd Law
Find Time of Flight for Projectiles
Measure Induction
See Doppler Rocket in Action
Use Visual Accelerometer
Show Conservation of Momentum
Verify Conservation of Mechanical Energy
Look at Diffraction of Light by a Single Slit
Measure Period of a Simple Pendulum

The purpose of this workshop is to provide teachers with information and experiences that will allow them to conduct inquiry-oriented laboratory activities in their classrooms. Special attention on how to involve students with disabilities will also be included in this workshop.