Last week, the Global Physics Department held another online first (that I know of), and invited 3 students (one 9th grader, one 11th grader, and one college freshman) to deliver presentations to 20 physics teachers and professors from around the nation.
My student, W, presented a capstone on a problem that came about from an off-hand remark I made when we were studying universal gravitation that he could probably go and write a program to model the time it takes for two masses to gravitationally attract one another. That comment proved to be enough to encourage the student to go and adapt an old program to try this out, and I was delightfully surprised when a few days later he stopped by with a working program. I was simply blown away when he did crazy incredible things like modify his program with an adjustable time-step that gets smaller as the masses come together in order to produce more accurate results.
Beyond just beaming with pride to see one of my students do something this impressive completely on his own, this presentation highlights two things to me. First, it clearly shows the power of a real audience. I think W gained greater insight into his work by trying to develop questions for the professors that would be watching. I think it was also immensely valuable to see that some of the questions this 9th grader was raising couldn’t immediately be answered by a physics professor. To me, it emphasizes the value of the process of learning, and shows that real learning is more than just being able to look something up/get an answer from someone smarter.
Secondly, W’s project demonstrates the power of computational thinking. This project was completed by a 9th grader taking Geometry. He has no understanding of integration or differential equations, the tools he would need to solve the problem analytically, and he won’t likely master these tools for another 5-6 years. But he does understand the idea of computation, and using the current value of the force and velocity to predict how the velocity will change and find the position a tiny step into the future, and then repeat this process over and over using a computer. And more than just getting the answer to this problem, I think the process of computational thinking gives him an excellent foundation on which to build his understanding of the calculus—what happens when we make those very small time steps infinitesimal?
Now, my challenge is to try to make sure each of my students learn both the power of computational thinking and the value of presenting to a real audience.
Finally, I encourage you to check out the recording meeting of the Global Physics Department last week, which features two additional presentations on vowel sound resonance from one of Josh Gates’s 11th graders and one of Andy Rundquist’s student’s presentation on building and analyzing a flute made from PVC.
Looking for a math teacher…
My new school, St. Andrew’s in Delaware, is looking for a math teacher. St. Andrew’s is an outstanding boarding school situated on 2500 acres of farmland in Middletown, Delaware, 1 hour from Philadelphia.
Here are a few other tidbits about the school:
- The culture of the school is unique, and really must be experienced to be believed. 300 students and 80 faculty living and working together to find deep joy in learning, work to make the world a better place, and be a compassionate, caring community that rejects the culture of pettiness and cynicism that infect the traditional high school.
- The school draws students from all over the world and is 100% need blind in its admissions. Nearly half of the student body receives financial aid.
- The school is led by a visionary headmaster, Tad Roach. To get a sense of what an incredible educational leader he is, I encourage you to read a few of his chapel talks.
- The faculty are incredible. You’ll be working with Kelly O’Shea, Mark Hammond, myself and many other incredibly supportive faculty.
- The school has incredible resources and facilities. John Allen Paulous spoke to the students a couple of years ago. The campus was the backdrop for Dead Poets Society.
- Classes are very small, usually around 12 students, and a typical load is 3 or 4 classes.
- You’ll get to help me bring MArTH Madness to St. Andrew’s—it’s going to be huge.
In short, the community is inspiring. If you’ve never considered boarding school teaching, you’ll be amazed by the connections you can form with students and what they can accomplish when you can encourage their academic interests outside the school day—driving to Philadelphia one Friday evening to see a lecture by Cornell West, or simply seeing math click for them during a study session one evening.
Here’s a link to the job description. Please feel free to ask questions (confidentially) in the comments and I’ll be happy to try to answer them or connect you with those who can.
Before there was Angry Birds Space, there was Pioneer 10
A couple of weeks ago, Rhett Allain wrote a beautiful post about why he continues his quest to figure out the physics of Angry Birds Space, which is a must read: Why do I love Angry Birds Analysis.
I think Rhett’s analogy is spot on, and I want to dig into a bit more detail about the Pioneer 10 anomaly and the comparison with Angry Birds Space—since these two situations are far more similar than you might think.
But lets start with little diversion from Richard Feynman, about another game, Chess, and how it is an apt analogy for science.
I love Feynman’s analogy. Science is a game. More precisely, it’s about learning the rules to the game, just by watching the game, and now, thanks to computers, setting up model games of our own.
Now what’s the connection Angry Birds Space? You launch a bird from a planet using a giant slingshot, and the bird moves along a trajectory. How does the game know the trajectory of the Birds? It calculates it knowing that the current velocity of the bird will tell us the future position of the bird a small time step in the future.
future position=current position + velocity * delta t
If delta t is small enough, the computer can make a very accurate calculation of the next position. But how does the program calculate the velocity? It uses a similar idea, along with Newton’s second law, 
future velocity = current velocity + Fnet/m*deltat
So in order to predict the future position of an object, given its current position, all we need are its current velocity and the forces acting on that object. If we can always calculate the forces acting on the object as it moves through space, we can predict the position. This works easily for Angry Birds, since the game designers decide exactly what the forces of the slingshot, planets and atmosphere will be, and code these forces into the program directly. This is the beauty of programming—the game designers are literally playing god in creating the Angry Bird universe and defining the laws that govern the motion of objects.
As players, we can’t read the laws that govern Angry Birds Space directly, we must deduce them through experiment—this is the science Feynman describes. This makes for a fun game for scientists like Rhett who like a good mystery. The program doesn’t tell us the forces, but if you carefully measure the trajectory of the Birds, you can begin to make some conclusions about the forces in Angry Birds Space. And then, if you’re super cool, you can use your conclusions about these forces to build your own model universe to calculate the trajectories of the birds and see how they match up to the ‘reality’ of the game.
Here’s an example of just what a wizard like Rhett can produce:
And as Rhett says, this is a fun exercise, much like indoor climbing, and if you really get stuck, you know that there’s someone you can turn to (the game designers) to help you out.
But the real fun happens when you start climbing on a real rock, and to understand what a real climb looks like in physics, we need to understand a bit more about Pioneer 10 and 11. These are robotic space probes launched in the early 1970s to explore the outer planets of Jupiter and Saturn, and ultimately escape the Solar System. The trajectory of the space probe is very similar to that of an Angry Bird, the launch by rocket is accelerates the spacecraft up to a particular velocity, and from there onward, with the exception of small course corrections made by thrusters, the trajectory of the space probe is determined by the gravitational forces from nearby masses, like planets.
That we can launch a space probe on a trajectory that has it pass just by a planet-moon system 800 million km away, speaks to the incredible understanding we have of “rules” of gravity and motion. But, as Feynman discusses in the video above, scientists are also always on the lookout for small signs that they may not have a full understanding of the rules of the game. In this case, it’s the observation that when measuring the velocity of Pioneer 10 using a doppler shift of its radio signal, scientists can’t account for 
Scientists have spent the past decade trying to account for this anomaly. In a move very similar to Rhett’s attempts to figure out the frictional drag on the angry birds, scientists have attempted to model some unknown drag force acting on the probe, or perhaps that the gravitational force is slightly stronger at those distances. Each of these possible explanations has been disproven with further experiments, such as measuring that Pluto does not experience a similar effect.
One of the most promising explanations of the anomalous acceleration was the possibility thermal radiation from the spacecraft’s main equipment compartment was reflecting off the back of the antenna and causing a very small acceleration toward the sun, tending to slow the spacecraft, as shown below.
But in order to test this idea, scientists needed to develop a computational model of the heat transfer of the spacecraft. And this makes a nice connection with the world of video games. It’s a pretty common problem in modern video games to need to model the how objects are illuminated in a virtual world. Current games now explicitly model this using a technique called Phong Shading, which divides objects into tiny polygons, and the calculates the reflection of light off of each of these small polygons. Both Phong Shading and the computational method for calculating position above illustrate the general approach to computational modeling. Take something complicated (the path of the spacecraft over a long period of time, or thermal reflection off of the back of the curved antenna), then break it apart into many small bits (tiny time steps, or tiny polygons on the antenna). Each bit can be described by simple physics (constant forces, or simple reflection), and a computer can then sum all of these bits to determine the overall result(the complete path of the spacecraft, or the total force on the space craft due to thermal reflection).
For our real Angry Birds Space problem, Pioneer 10, we not only need a computer to help us model the path of the spacecraft, we need a computer to help us model the possible forces that are acting on the object, and when we do this, we find our models, based on physics we understand fully, predict the path of the spacecraft completely within our current measurement, or as Francisco et. al. put it in their paper:
With the results presented here it becomes increasingly apparent that, unless new data arises, the puzzle of the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer probes can finally be put to rest.
This is why Rhett’s work with computational modeling and Angry Birds Space is so interesting—it bring challenging and current problems like Pioneer 10 to physics students at the introductory level, and teaches students the same tools of computational modeling that are used even in the most complex problems. With the Pioneer anomaly solved, Angry Birds Space seems to offer plenty of mystery to keep physicists busy.
Learning journals: inspiration from a learning journalist
Recently I discovered and am greatly enjoying the blog Baby Steps in Data Journalism, by Journalism professor Mindy McAdams (@macloo). This blog is Prof McAdams’s efforts to learn programming from the very basics in order to “learn to do data journalism.”
Professor McAdams seems to be beginning from the very foundation of programming. She’s selected some great texts and resources to get started, including Nathan Yau’s excellent book: Visualize this The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization and Statistics. What I enjoy most about this blog is that it is very clearly documenting Professor’s McAdams’ learning journey one small step at a time. She chronicles her experiences installing Python, points out errors she found in the text, and is commenting on ideas that she learns in a number of online Python courses.
Each of these bite size posts are helping me to remember what it’s like to learn programming for the first time, and find enjoyment in her process of learning. Here’s a good example, where Professor McAdams explains how she finds the behavior of the return statement in Python to be a bit peculiar. I learned programming so long ago that I find it hard to remember that these things were ever peculiar to me, and so it’s very instructive to read these insights and also see how quickly you can go from being a complete novice in programming to scraping year’s worth of temperature data from weather.com and graphing it.
I have to also think that years down the road, Professor McAdams will find tremendous value in the blog she is keeping now. Imagine being able to go back and follow your learning process for a particular skill from its very first steps. I know I’ve found myself going back to older posts in my blog often to remember how I learned or did a particular thing.
This gets me thinking that it would be a very valuable exercise for many students to do this themselves. What if students also kept a learning journal of their work in a similar fashion, and wrote short (less than 100 words) posts describing what were learning, what things they were still confused about, and any other questions they may have. I think it would be incredibly instructive for a teacher to regularly get these insights into his students’ thinking.
What do you think? Could this work? Part of me thinks it would be hard to achieve the level of quality of this baby steps blog, since this is the work of a very accomplished journalism practice, but then I think if an approach like this were to become the backbone of their learning in all of their courses, students might make very rapid progress, and who knows what they could do?
My SACS AAPT presentation on the Global Physics Department
This Saturday at 9:15am, I’ll be giving a presentation on the Global Physics Department at the Spring meeting of the Southern Atlantic Coast Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers hosted by the University of Georgia in Athens.
Here’s the abstract:
The Global Physics Department (GPD) is a weekly online gathering of college and high school physics teachers that has become a very convenient and powerful form of profes- sional development for physics teachers across the globe. Past meetings have included presentations from prominent scientists, textbook authors and many experts in Physics Education Research. This presentation will outlinethe founding of the GPD, some high- lights from past meetings, and discuss current and future plans, including its latest online coaching initiative, where physics teachers are able to submit teaching videos to the group for substantial feedback from a large and diverse collection of physics teachers.
Here are the slides from the presentation:
Who says people have lost interest in the space program?
This week marked another milestone in the end of the space shuttle program as the shuttle Discovery was flown for the last time to be displayed at the National Museum of Air and Space Udvar-Hazy Center (which is a must visit if you’re in the DC area).
Not too surprisingly, I think for many students and perhaps some adults, this event passed almost without notice. Many of my students were even too young to remember the Columbia disaster, and for reasons I can’t fully comprehend, the space program has fallen out of the public consciousness.
This is why if you haven’t seen it, you should watch this very moving testimony from Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson that places this decline on our collective failure to stop dreaming.
I can remember the excitement of the shuttle program in its heyday. In fact, one of my fondest memories of visiting my grandparents in Florida was getting to look through his albums of square photographs of all of the shuttle launches, which he attended almost religiously.
I agree with Dr. Tyson that the space program can fill us with dreams, regardless of who you are—young or old, male or female. That point was made abundantly clear to me this week when one of my former students, M, was successful in her quest to launch a space balloon, which I’ve written about before—here, here and here.
Here’s the video one of the students edited with footage of the launch:
This was an outstanding first launch. M and two students who I am now teaching have worked together all year long to help a very enthusiastic group of 6th and 7 graders design and build the space balloon. Unfortunately, some unforeseen hiccup caused the video from the camera to stop after 30 minutes of recording, so they only got some very nice high altitude photos of the school campus, along with a nice treat of an airplane flying the field of view of the camera when it was high over Atlanta.
If you watch the video, the enthusiasm of the students who participated in this project is strong and palpable. This excitement was even more evident in the photos as M recovered the balloon 2.5 hours southeast of Atlanta. The group is already hard at work with plans for their next launch, thinking about how they’ll add sensors to measure altitude and temperature, and how to troubleshoot their camera to make sure it can film the complete flight.
The total cost of this space balloon has been fairly minimal—probably less than $500. And the project itself has been done 100% by these students, with very little intervention from me. This gets me thinking that space balloons might be the answer to getting students more excited by about space exploration again, by helping them to become space explorers themselves. Maybe this could be the key to re-energizing the space program.
One last thought as I am contemplating how to bring more PBL into my classroom—I don’t see why building a space balloon has to be an extracurricular activity. This could be a great project for almost any science class from middle to high school to take on. Instead of memorizing all the names for various parts of the atmosphere in Earth Science, you’re actually studying them by measuring temperature and altitude. If you want to understand electronics, there are great lessons to be learned in electronics and programming by trying to build a circuit to connect altimeter and thermistor to an arduino. There’s plenty of physics involved in understanding the buoyant force that cause the air to rise, you can get into gas laws to predict when the balloon will burst, and how much Helium it will take to fill the balloon. If you’ve used a space balloon project in an actual course, I’d love to hear about it.
I’ve always had a thing for standardized testing. That’s because I thought the tests meant something, and that’s because I was good at them. I can remember learning what the word stanine meant as a 4th grader, and how proud I was to be in the 9th stanine. In high school, I took the SAT more than half a dozen times, with the ultimate goal of earning a perfect 1600 that I never achieved. As a naive high school student, I never really thought about what these tests measured. I just thought they measured “intelligence” and the fact that I scored well on them must be a good thing. I’m also too ashamed to admit what I thought of peers who didn’t score as well. Luckily, my last experience with standardized testing was a rather humiliating encounter with the Physics GRE my senior year, and I left college much more humbled than I entered it.
A few years spent working as a college counselor helped me to see just how warped my perspective on standardized testing was. In that job, I encountered incredible students— intellectual leaders in their classes, making outstanding contributions to the extracurricular life of the school, who found their applications to colleges tarnished to some degree by some difficulty with standardized testing. These students all went on to see success later in college, and in countless conversations with other college counselors and admissions officers, I came to realize that all these tests do is provide a convenient basis for comparing students across the world with a single number. In the age of high pressure college admissions where officers have to read hundreds of applications a day, this can be a very helpful thing. The key is to remember all the things that number does not measure, all the ways in which it might be a distorted comparison, and all the ways it may be abused by forgetting these things.
Still, these lessons were still somewhat abstract, and it wasn’t until very recently that the lessons came for me in the most real way.
My school has made major investments in technology—we’re implementing a 1:1 program throughout the school, we’ve made massive upgrades to the bandwidth and technology infrastructure, we’ve increased support staffing and professional development throughout the school to help teachers develop ways to use this technology in their classes that aligns with 21st century learning. This investment has cost millions of dollars, and naturally like most investments, someone is going to want some data to see what the return is on that investment.
And so it was with technology. We need a way to efficiently measure how teachers use technology in their teaching so that we can target training and support for the future. The first question is what should we measure? Luckily, some very thoughtful educators have already developed the ISTE.NETS-T standards and performance indicators. These are mostly excellent—they provide a clear framework what a technology empowered teacher should be able to do.
Enter WayFind
The real question is how do you measure these standards? I’ll present how I think you might do this at the end of this post, but my school chose to measure them by having the full faculty take a 45 minute multiple choice test, the WayFind Teacher Assessment for Effective 21st Century Teachers, designed by learning.com. Learning.com is a supplemental business of the 18 billion dollar conglomerate Educomp Solutions Ltd, based in India.
Of course, as soon as a new set of standards are created for just about anything in education, a cottage industry of testing outfits tries to develop some new “diagnostic instrument” aligned to these standards, eager to “monetize this space with a disruptive but authentic assessment that takes advantage of the latest advances in automated scoring technology.”
At first WayFind seems particularly promising, since it is touted as more than just a multiple-choice test. It features task questions, that require the user to show how do a particular task on a simulated computer.
WayFind loses its way
And so I spent one afternoon taking this Way Find assessment—standardized tests were my friend right? Very quickly, I learned something was up with this particular standardized test. Many of the questions were vague or ambiguous.
Many of the questions ask you to choose the “best” method, and while I’m sure that some methods are better than others, I often found myself being able to make a case for multiple methods, depending on circumstances. Here’s an example:
Suppose you were hosting a workshop on digital literacy for parents. What is the best way to invite parents to such a workshop:
- send out an E-vite
- send an email
- write a letter
- write a blog post
Though I’m not sure my answer is correct, I think there’s a very strong case to be made that sending a letter home would be the best way to attract those who aren’t digitally literate to a workshop on digital literacy. Of course, if the entire school has a working mailing list, with email addresses for all parents, that might also be the best way. I could even see that a blog post might very well be the best method for a school with a regularly updated blog that many parents go to see, since such a workshop probably isn’t so critical that we need to clog parent inboxes or mailboxes with invites.
Other questions asked you to simply select the right keyboard shortcut for a common task, like opening a file. However all the provided answers were windows shortcuts, and our faculty use macs. While I think shortcuts are vital, and one of those small stepping stones that really empower users to excel with technology, I’m not sure testing a user on whether he/she remembers a particular shortcut from a different platform does much to tell me whether he or she is an effective 21st century educator.
Then there are the tasks. They presented you with a simulated computer interface that looked like a bad reproduction of the Windows 95 interface, complete with a cramped 640×480 window that I remember from more than a decade ago. The tasks were simple-show students how to save this file, and you had to walk your way thorough this artificial interface, and then when you clicked on the right (or wrong) button, presto, your answer was recorded and you moved on to the next question with no feedback. Of course, even the world’s worst computer interface wouldn’t do this—if I were truly trying to save a file, I would get some confirmation of the file being saved from the user interface, and if I didn’t, I would know to go back and try again.
Mostly, I found myself puzzling over what this test was actually testing, and how these questions, which seemed to be plucked from 2008, were measuring my mastery of the ISTE standards. I wonder what statistical tests the designers of WayFind did to verify that their test measures what they say it is does. This information isn’t available on the WayFind website.
Some reflections on my results
A couple of days later, I got my results, which I have included here in full disclosure.
I don’t want to be immodest, but it’s a bit hard to understand how someone who helped to start the Global Physics Department, and has attended every single meeting in the past year, even setting up a VPN connection between my iPad to my home computer to attend from Puerto Rico only qualifies as “proficient” in Professional Growth. Similarly, I’ve written and read extensively on Digital Citizenship, surly to a point past “basic”. I’ve skyped with teachers from across the country to measure the circumference of the earth, which must be an advanced example of “digital age learning experiences.” My students have completed capstone projects on their own blogs that have gathered feedback from teachers and professors across the nation—surely a sign of “digital age learning” and “creativity.” I was heartened by these results when an art teacher colleague told me that WayFind identified creativity as an area for growth, and a librarian had missed questions on information technology and copyright.
My score is actually below average for my department and just barely above the average of the school as a whole. Yet, I’m tasked with being the Department Integration Specialist responsible for helping my colleagues use technology to increase the effectiveness of their teaching.
If you look more closely at the results, you’ll see that almost each of the individual standards is tested by only three questions, and the difference between proficient and advanced could very likely be a disputed interpretation of an ambiguous question.
That’s when I remembered the lessons I’ve learned from standardized testing—I just never thought it would apply to me. In almost every case, standardized tests are shallow and impoverished attempts to measure something. The SAT doesn’t measure intelligence—it has gone through so many machinations that now the acronym SAT literally has no meaning. And Way Find doesn’t even begin to measure technological expertise or effectiveness as a 21st century teacher.
But that’s not to say that these tests don’t have consequences. I must say I felt inadequate upon seeing these results, and wondered immediately how a 9th grader, forced to take the PSAT for literally no reason, must feel about scoring in the 20th percentile in math, when he has yet to study all of the math on the test. What does this do to that student’s confidence in math? If taking assessments like this helps me and my colleagues to develop a greater sense of empathy for students and the struggles they face with standardized testing, that would be a wonderful benefit.
Just having the data itself might also have consequences. It’s in our nature to want to use all the information in front of us, even that information is deeply flawed or incomplete. I’ve seen colleagues at previous schools turn to PSAT scores to make decisions about whether a student deserves to be an an honors science class—despite the fact that the teacher has never studied how that PSAT scores predict success in a honors science class (likely because no such correlation exists).
I trust that when my administrators say that these scores are diagnostic, they are just that. But I know we are all human, and if we had this score that purported to measure each teacher’s effectiveness as a 21st century teacher, wouldn’t you be tempted to use it? Maybe in assigning classes, you’d be just a small bit inclined to pair up that low scoring teacher with a high scoring colleague so that they can plan classes together. And certainly, when those hard decisions come around and you have to decide whether to renew a contract, you would not let an abysmally low score add just a bit more weight to the “do not renew” decision, would you? I would certainly be tempted to use this information, simply because it is there.
Most importantly, what do I do now that I’m deemed proficient? How do I become advanced? How does this test help me to learn? I don’t get to see the questions I missed, nor, as far as I understand, do my administrators. This assessment doesn’t tell me what things I can do successfully, nor does it provide me with challenges to further improve my skills. This provides me with very little opportunity to grow, and only the vaguest possible notion of my weaknesses. Again, this makes me feel lots of empathy for students across the country who get standardized test results back and only see a single number.
A possible alternative
We could do so much better. Why do we need to turn to impoverished assessments like this when we can design far better assessments on our own? The task assignments on WayFind give us a glimpse of what could be a truly useful assessment. You’re taking this test on a computer—so give the teacher a real task. Here are just a few:
- Show that you can successfully take an image from the web, add callouts to that image and properly cite it for use on a assessment.
- Record a screencast annotation of grading a student paper, and post it on a blog.
- Start a twitter account and find 5 teachers at your school and 5 teachers outside of your school in your discipline to follow.
- Troubleshoot a common error message with Google.
- Create a document you wish to email to a colleague, save it to a pdf, and upload it to a cloud based service like Drobpox so that you can email the document to the colleague without the need for an attachment.
You could generate tasks at every level so that every faculty member could demonstrate mastery of some task, and still have other tasks that would give them ideas and challenges for future growth.
If the goal is to have every teacher develop into effective 21st Teacher who understands technology, why not ask faculty to keep a portfolio, and provide and reflect upon artifacts from their own teaching that they feel demonstrate these standards? This would seem to be far more beneficial to the faculty member, as it would leave them with something tangible upon completing the assessment, and similarly for administrators, who would have real examples of effective teaching they could point to.
I wish I could say that WayFind is a magical standardized assessment that will help you to diagnose the technology needs of your department or school. Certainly, it is in its early stages as an assessment, and so maybe it will grow into something more useful. But based on my experience, and conversation with a number of colleagues, I can’t recommend it now. There are meta lessons to be learned from taking a standardized assessment as an adult, especially one so poorly designed as WayFind, but if this is the lesson you seek to teach, you’ll save money and time by having them read this 35 year-old’s account of taking the SAT as an adult.
