Week 7

Week in Review

Monday-Wednesday

This was a crazy-fun week for 8th science as conducted one of our most rigorous inquiry labs of the year - the CSI Mystery Lab on Who killed Dr. Todd?

Was it the belittled custodian? the crazy shop teacher? the ambitious assistant principal? the pernicious nurse? or the samurai social studies teacher?

A mysterious white powder was found on the lapel of Dr. Todd's suit and coincidentally(?) all suspects had white powders around their person when questioned about the murder.  8th grade science students were employed to help solve the case.

On the first day students made a grid of the physical and chemical properties of  5 powders - salt, sugar, corn starch, baking soda, and talc.  They examined the powders response to heat (sugar carmelizes), to water (talc beads the water off), to iodine (corn starch turns black), and to vinegar (baking soda bubbles). They also looked at the particles' structure under a microscope (salt is really cubed and really cool).

 

On the second day students were given samples of the powders found on all 5 suspects.  Each suspect's powder was a mixture of 2 of the white powders and students had to examine the physical and chemical properties of each suspect to see which powder they matched up with, and ultimately, which powder matched the incriminating powder found on Dr. Todd's lapel.

On the third day students sat trouble and did the difficult work of making sure they correctly matched the characteristics of each suspect's powder to the correct base powder.   I loved this day because it was an opportunity for higher order thinking and rigorous retesting. Students had to deduce why their powder's characteristics weren't matching up, then go back and conduct further tests, deduce again, perhaps retest, over and over and over again.  

Most of the time I don't feel like I'm hitting a home run with rigor and relevance. Most of the time  I feel like I'm preparing students for an end of unit or high-stakes test but this week was different. This lab was all about giving a challenging, fun, collaborative assignment that mimicked real life criminal justice lab work.  I felt like I was preparing students to work in "life after school" and this was a great example of how "real science" involves doing multiple tests and trials again.... and again..... and again.  Thank you Ashley Shaw for introducing me to this lab last year.

P.S. It was the pernicious nurse if you were wondering. 

Thursday-Friday

Crazy lab week. These two days we conducted our final lab on the properties of substances and we made hockey pucks of cement.  We did this because we talked about how engineers have discovered they need to reinforce concrete with different fibers because though concrete has great compressive strength it is lacking shear and tensile strength. If we didn't reinforce concrete then all the walls would come a tumblin' down during earthquakes.

The challenge: create the strongest hockey puck using any combination of 5 fibers (tooth picks, pipe cleaner, yarn, cotton balls, or string).

 

We're letting them harden over the weekend and then we'll be testing them by smashing them on the sidewalk on Monday and seeing which one has the fewest cracks forming.

Lessons Learned

1. Technology - sometimes when you're a pilot FLiP room you dont' use your laptops all week. And that's ok.
2. Wrong Answers- I had many students get the wrong results on the CSI Lab. And I think that's ok.  One of the best quotes I've ever heard about learning is "Learning is a long, slow, continuous conversation that takes time."  We just started the conversation.