Phun really is fun!

I must say, I was very intrigued by the programs that we were working with this week. In my chosen field of math, I have always been interested in physics and chemistry. So when I got the chance to work with programs that incorporated those two sciences, I was very excited. I believe that just playing around with Phun was fun enough for me. I really like it's understanding of how objects block water flow and without them, water flows. Also I was glad to see the programs understanding of weight and fixed objects- IE. to make axles. Molecular Workbench seemed fun- but I would like to know what else you do, other than the pre-created self assembly.

Thinking back to the schooling that I've gone through, I could see Phun being used in younger grades to show the idea of physics in a creative, entertaining way. Over the weekend, I told my Mom, a third grade teacher, about this program. I believe that students, even as young as her students, would be able to visually see the physics happening without all of the mess of actually completeing the task in real life. I think that as long as the teacher has a strong grasp of the program, students would be able to greatly benefit when studying the concepts of physics. When students get into higher grades, IE middle school, the students would benefit in their application of physics by utilizing this program.

And as far as Molecular Workbench- I see that being used in conjunction with a new concept of Chemistry in high school. I think that Molecular Workbench could be used for a pre-assessment as to the knowledge and understanding that a student or group of students might have towards the idea of positive and negative charges, molecules, and/or temperature reactivity. I think that the ability to read the direction and then work on the problem at hand is good to keep student's interest. I also think that the ability to easily take screen shots and to write comments/ observations is an excellent way for teachers to be able to assess the student's understanding during or after the exercise.

I feel that if I enjoyed using the programs that I will be interested and excited enough to continue how to learn the program and therefore I could show this, especially Phun, to other teachers in order to have them utlilze the program when working with the Physics concepts that so many Science teachers encounter.

Sketch-Up/ POV-Ray Applications

Using Sketch-Up, I had fun completing a visual of the wants in my new kitchen that I'm planning to redo in the summertime. The two walls that were completed in the sketch are the walls that I want to do redo completely. The cabinets are not drawn to the scale that I am intending to use, but I have already planned to change my drawing in order to accomodate for all four walls of the kitchen and the exact dimensions. Any suggestions of materials- feel free to comment :)

As far as POV-RAY goes, I drug my feet with this program. I found it very difficult to work with and I was not interested to continue working with it. I felt as though the program could be SOooo much more beneficial if I could click and drag an image to the placement that I wanted- And watched how the numbers would change instead of just clicking and guessing as to where the image should go based on the camera angles and placement in the first place. Here's part of my living room:

However, after choosing a more simplistic set of shapes, I was able to accomplish my goal in creating something realistic. Using the geometric shapes that I understood their relation in space, I was able to more freely create these shapes in the POV-Ray program.

Below, is the POV-RAY source code for the series of shapes that I used to create the living room space. The tutorials were definitely a help when it came to making this work successfully.

#include "colors.inc"

global_settings { assumed_gamma 1.0 }

background { color rgb <0.25,> }

camera { location <3.0,> up <0,1.2,0> }

light_source {<5,5,5> color White }

light_source {<-5,5,-5> color White}

light_source {<0,0,0> color White}

plane { <0,-1,0> 1 texture { pigment { color rgb <0.3,0.9,0.5>} normal {facets coords 1.0} }}

plane { <0,0,14> 8 texture {pigment { color rgb <0.7,0.4,0.1>} normal { wood 0.2 turbulence 0.7 }}}

box { <-1.0,-1.0,-1.0>, <1.0,1.0,1.0> texture { pigment { color rgb <.4, .4, .2>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,15>} }
box { <-1.0,-1.0, 1.0>, <2.0,2.0,4.0> texture { pigment { color rgb <.45, .44, .22>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,25>} }
box { <-0.85,2.0,1.1>, <1.85,2.3,3.9> texture { pigment { color rgb <0.46,0.43,0.21>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,15>} }

box { <-0.8,2.3,1.2>, <1.8,> texture { pigment { color rgb <0,>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,15>} }

sphere { <0.5,2.3,2.5> .5 texture { pigment {color rgb <1,1,1>} normal {ripples 0.5}}}

cone { <0.5,>, 0.0, <.5, 6.2, 2.5>, .6 texture {pigment {color rgb <1,1,1>} normal {ripples 0.5} rotate <0,45,0>}}

cone { <0.5,6.1,2.5>, 1.4, <0.5,10.1,2.5>, 1.0 texture {pigment {color rgb <1,0.91,0.3>}}}

TQ #7: Gapminder

I must admit, when I first took a look at this website- I was sooo excited about it. At the current point in my curriculum at school, we were working on interpretting graphs. It was my plan that this website would be awesome in order to show students the real-life examples that they so often ask for. I was so excited to show my students how graphs can be such wonderful tools to organize and display data. I was also so excited to have them all working on a topic that interested them while on the same website; asking similar but different questions.-talk about differentiation. The possibilities were endless and my excitement was overwhelming. I was so interested to show this to one of my boss's but boy, am I glad, that I did not invite them in...

The night before the lesson where I was going to have the students work on interrpreting the graphs from gapminder.org/world, I explored the website and pulled out the variables that 7th grade students might find interest in exploring. Here's the list that I posted on the board for the students to choose two variables to compare:
Income per person
Infant mortality rate
Children per woman
Life expectany at birth
CO2 emissions
Sugar consumption per person
Female labour force
Military expenditure
Total income
Primary school completion (girls/ boys)
Ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary ed
Literacy rate (adults and children)(girls/boys/ total)
Population
Children and elderly (per adults)
Surface area
Paved roads
Urban population
Mortality rate
Health issues (etc)
Electricity/ Oil consumption
Cell phone use
Internet users
Poverty
Export/Import of goods and services

Each student choose two variables, I set them off to start up the computers and head to the website with some time to explore on their own. The students choose wonderful comparisons and I was really interested to see the connections they could make. UN-fortunately, my excitement fell short when all we could view was a grey screen. Usually most websites are very compatible with Mac computers and I thought this one would be the same- I checked it briefly in the morning to make sure that it wasn't blocked and thought that things would be a go. Unfortunately I have still not been able to complete this lesson plan with the students and as much as I don't like assigning homework that can't be done at school- I did, just so that I could share the excitement of this powerful tool with some of my students.

All in all, I think this tool, when working properly, has loads of organized information that is able to be understood by many, many children. By having the ability to choose variables that interest/ that student can relate to really gives a powerful edge to this program. By being able to view the 'continent areas' (used loosely as they were generally continents but not always) in different colors, your statements can be very general in that you see the majority trends of that area. But then, you are able to be very specific/ selective in order to view just one country and watch/track it's trends. The connections that students could make to graphs are endless and the connections that they can make the real world could potentially be a very persuasive tool to show the change that may need to be made. I've put in a work-order in order to hopefully provide the students their chance to really engage in a discussion based on this website.

As far as limitations, I would be concerned about all of the different variables that students can choose. Some are very appropriate for all ages but there are a view that could be viewed as providing too much information for some young minds. There are some graphs that have limited data but I think that proves an interesting tool in order to promote reasonable estimations based on the trends that we are able to uncover. Overall, I am definitely looking forward to the time when I can share this tool with my students during our graphing unit.

TQ #6: Elluminate revisited

I must say, I need to retrack any former statements that I said about Elluminate. I was very surprised about the abilities that I didn't realize that there were on Elluminate. From the ability for more than one person to communicate to the ability to have students work ahead on their work if interested but then also forced at points to all be at the same page. I was also very impressed that I recieved an email from Elluminate, asking me if I wanted to view a live demo of the Elluminate in order to be a better "leader". I have to say that after that Thursday night class, my opinions have definitely changed and I am considering using this tool in order to provide a different form of help for my students. Time... And learning on my part... will tell.