Triple Helix

Hackett After School Science Club with Linda Carey and Michael Lachney

[Show as slideshow]

Math: Geometry, Algebra, slope, graphs

Science: Friction, Energy, Wind resistance, acceleration

Materials Needed: glue gun, cardboard, toy cars, finger skateboards, scissors, marbles, computers

Prep: Run Skateboarder CSDT – may need to install java on computers and download SB applets to computer hard drives. Optionally, you can just open in a browser: http://csdt.rpi.edu/subcult/sb/index.html

Open the Skateboarder application for each student, spend a few days letting them play around and experiment with the software, asking questions wherever they find the need to. During that, spend days on lessons talking about circle degrees for using the arcs for ramps, moving segments programmatically using translation or rotation, and elasticity and friction.

Challenges:

• Create your own skate park (to be referenced when you create your cardboard model).
• Try to get your boarder to stop on a ramp.
• Change the background of the application to a picture of your face and create a skate park so the skater skates around your face!
• Once you are content with your software skate park, create models out of cardboard mimicking the software models and compare what the software skater does compared to how a marble/finger skateboard/toy car behaves on the cardboard model.

Teaching materials are also available

Science club is very exciting this year. I couldn’t believe that our 8 to 10 students last year has turned into 20 this year. That’s also a challenge. The good part about Science club is that all of the students have self selected to be there – which almost guarantees better behavior and greater attention span from the students. Science club meets during the lunch period which only lasts about 30 minutes. In that amount time food needs to be eaten and an activity needs to start and finish. Given the amount of time, good behavior is absolutely crucial to accomplishing anything meaningful.

Mrs. Carey and I have been working on the Ghana connection. The CSDT community site is almost ready, and that would be an exciting means for the Hackett students and Ayeduase students to interact, with the focus being on the pCSDTs. My Kente cloth simulation is deployed and really needs students to play with it for further development ideas to be generated. The Community site will provide some much needed ‘social presence’ which so far has been missing from the CSDT and pCSDT programs.