Getting Teaching Done

Merry Christmas! I hope the holidays have brought you what you wanted, and that you have to deal with as few unpleasant relatives and explosive trees as possible.

We’ve discovered that there’s enough current flowing through the wires to get them to…

Last week we discovered just how much current Clark’s lights would draw; a massive 1040 A of current on a circuit only meant to carry 15 A.

When you get current that high, even the tiny resistance of wires starts to matter. Wires that normally conduct…

Like many people, I have fond memories of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It’s a classic with my family, one we make a point to watch every year.

As a science geek, and with an electrical engineer father, seeing Clark’s rediculous lighting plan,…

Last Thursday was the last day of class for my Grade 11 DP Physics students, so I gave them a challenge: Get to space in Kerbal Space Program! (more…)

Students... In... SPAAAAACE!

I mentioned Kerbal Space Program here before, but I was finally able to get my students to use it…

My Lego Robotics team is famous now! :)

My Lego Robotics team was featured in City Weekend Parents and Kids in their Club Profile! (more…)

Why I (Want To) Use: Kerbal Space Program and SimpleRockets

There’s always a few parts of Physics that can be hard to teach in an interesting way. There’s not…

I'm published! (Sort of...)

Found a picture of me in a Chinese magazine article about the school!

Decomposers and Lego

So my Grade 7 Science students have been studying ecosystems, and we’ve gotten to decomposers. I’ve…

Finding Friction

Today was the last day for my Grade 11 non-IB Physics students to finish their friction project. I…

I read this interesting Wired article on a teacher in Mexico who had some really great success using a version of Sugara Mitra’s “minimally invasive education”. It’s started me looking into it for my classes, and how that might work. (more…)

I’ve been trying to use Pasco’s SparkVue Mac application for data logging experiments in class. It’s supposed to be a simpler data logger than Data Studio or the more recent Capstone, but I’m finding it to be really frustrating.

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One of the first struggles you might face when teaching Physics is helping students really understand how motion graphs show how something moves. If you have Pasco probeware, you’re in luck.

(Full disclosure: I learned this from Ian Fogarty, a great…

In past years, I’ve been using Turnitin for many of my internal assessment. Apparently, admin noticed, and I was asked to do a presentation on using Turnitin! Read on if you’d like to see video of the presentation. (more…)

It’s not very often that you get a chance to show students how things work in real jobs. A lot of what we teach is theoretical, codified, crystallized knowledge, when what we want them to learn is how to work effectively with new, messy problems as…

Classroom Tools: ChemCollective Virtual Lab

I’m focusing mostly on physics here, but chemistry needs some love, too! It can be difficult to…

I’m trying to keep to a Thursday/Sunday schedule for this blog, but you might have noticed no posts from me last week. Well, it was China’s National Day Holiday week (one of a few government holiday weeks), and my wife and I went away to Boracay in the…