Paper Roller Coaster Reflection Questions

1. Correctly use all of the following terms in a 1 to 2 paragraph description of the way your roller coaster worked: potential energy, kinetic energy, gravity, friction, centripetal force, velocity, acceleration
2. What was the most difficult part of this project for you individually? Explain.
3. What was the most difficult part of this project for your group as a whole? Explain.
4. Concerning your coaster design (support structure, track, etc) what changes would you make if you were to build your coaster again?
5. On a scale of 1 – 10 (10 being highest), how would you rate your coaster designing and building process overall? Explain your score based one:

• Time Management
• Materials Management
• Unexpected Challenges Overcome
• Safety of your Coaster
• How well you worked as a group to get the coaster finished on time

Punnett Square Practice Problems

Today in class you will be completing the Punnett Square Practice Problems. Use pages 124 and 125 of your notebook to show your work. For each problem:

1. Define the Alleles
2. Determine the Parent Type
3. Do the Cross
4. Answer any probability questions

You may work with a partner as long as Mr. Weist, Mr. Garman, and Ms. Brienza feel you are working on the task at hand.

See you tomorrow!

Gregor Mendel

Here is today’s presentation on Gregor Mendel. I’m trying out SlideShare for the first time, so feel free to comment on this format rather than the regular link to a presentation file.

Genetics Coded Definitions

genetic-code-sheet

Here is the sheet to decode the Genetics definitions. It’s a little grainy in areas, but I think you can figure out what each letter is. The decoded definitions go on page 118.

Technology Suggestions for Teachers

I frequently read Edutopia Magazine. It’s a magazine created by the George Lucas Foundation (yes, the Star Wars and Indiana Jones guy) for teachers about using Technology for Learning. Recently, one of their writers, Sara Bernard, sent out a request looking for responses to the following question:

What if you had to teach the classes you are taking now or something you learned years ago? How would you use technology to do it? What devices, software, games, networks, or applications would you use to help students learn more easily — and have more fun learning?

For instance, imagine that it was your job to teach algebra, Charles Dickens, volleyball, poetry, a foreign language, science, or the Civil War. Would you have your English students use Facebook to create profiles for each main character in Jane Eyre? Would you have them use Garage Band to create a World War II song or the national anthem of a fictional country? Would you use instant messaging or cell phones as tools for classroom discipline? Could you learn math from Mario?

The point of this is for Edutopia to gather specific ideas and advice from you for teachers to try in their classrooms. So, be sure to describe things in a way that a teacher – any teacher – would understand. You might want to mention any rules about technology and media that exist at your school and whether or not they would need to be modified. We’d love to hear as many suggestions as you can think of!

Student responses can be based on experiences that they’ve actually had in class or just ideas that they’ve come up with themselves. They should also feel free to offer basic advice for teachers about technology integration, or any other thoughts they have on the topic. This isn’t an essay contest, so no pressure — students can just drop a few lines into an email if they like (though I’d appreciate it if they could include their name, grade level, school, and location).

Let’s see if we can help Sara out. What ideas do you have for using technology in the classroom, ANY classroom? Let’s try to be realistic, but think of some ways you use technology that might translate well into a classroom.

Go to the wiki, and Create a Page named “_______’s Technology Ideas”. Put it in the folder Edutopia Tech Ideas.

At the end of your letter to Sara, include your first name, grade level, school, and Newport, NC. I will be sharing these ideas with Sara. Who knows, maybe some will wind up used in the magazine.

Wikis, Glogs, TeensHealth…Oh my!

Today in class we have several activities that will be taking place. You will be reading several articles and visiting several websites about body systems.

First:

1. Go to http://williamsonscience.pbwiki.com
2. Click on Log In at the upper right
3. Log In with your Username and Password
4. Click “Create a Page”
5. Name your page using your first name and first initial of your last name and Articles (ex. John Doe would use JohnDArticles)
6. On your page, you are going to write your summary/analysis of Texting on the Move
7. When you finish your summary/analysis (30 to 50 word summary, minimum 100 word analysis), click “Save”
8. Please provide a link to the article in the title. To do this, first open the article in a new window or tab. Next, type the name of the article, highlight it, and click the Globe/Chain Link button.
9. Change Link Type to URL
10. Copy the URL from the article page, and paste it into the box beside http://
11. Click OK.
12. We will work on linking your article to a page for each Core.

After summarizing the Texting Article, check out TeensHealth for other articles related to kids your age. I encourage you to look through the site, however, some of the articles fall outside of the realm of our studies for the year. Please stick with the sections on “Your Body”, “Food & Fitness”, and “Staying Safe”.

Find one more article and write a summary/analysis on the same Wiki Page you just created. To add a Horizontal Bar between summaries, click the button with the “A” above and below the horizontal line.

When you finish, raise your hand and Mr. Williamson will tell you what to do next.

Blood Types

In class the past couple of days we’ve been discussing human blood types. We talked about the four major blood groups and the difference between positive and negative blood. Tonight students are working through some questions about the percentage of people in the United States who have each blood type. For those who didn’t get the question sheet in class today, here is a link to the questions, click on the image to bring up a full screen version of the questions:

Teens and Dieting

Today in class we started a discussion about teenagers and dieting. There were many opinions heard, but I’m sure there are many other things left unsaid.

There are many angles to be explored on this topic. Things such as Body Mass Index (BMI), obesity, health benefits and risks of certain diets, eating disorders in teenagers, peer pressure, media glamorization of people with unhealthy eating habits, etc…

If these issues and our discussion interested you, I encourage you to go out and do some research on your own. Look at several sites about one of the issues above, make up your mind what your thoughts are on that issue and post to the blog. Links to the articles that influenced your thinking are strongly encouraged.

For example:

Here’s a link to an article detailing the NCAA’s ruling that 7th and 8th graders are to be considered “Prospective Atheletes” which prevents coaches from recruiting them to their University. This came up in the discussion about whether teenagers should be focusing on weightlifting, strength training, etc in preparation for high school, college, and professional athletics. In recent years, coaches had started recruiting kids as young as 12 and 13 since there were rule preventing them from recruiting at camps once they started high school.

****EDIT****

Here is a link to a page with several great articles on Food and Fitness written for Teens.  If you read an article from this page, please provide a short summary (30 to 50 words) and your analysis (50 to 100 words) of the article plus a link to the actual article page.

Kids Health Food and Fitness

3rd World Farmer

No, I haven’t decided that I’m teaching Social Studies In my “research” (yes, that means time sitting around randomly searching the web for interesting things) I came across a few games/simulations that relate to your studies in Mr. Garman’s class. This is one of them. In 3rd World Farmer your job is to choose crops to plant and harvest each year to try and survive as a farming family in a 3rd world country. Along the way you will have to make decisions about sending your children off to school, increasing their knowledge, but decreasing your ability to farm your land. You may also have to make the choice of spending your hard earned money to purchase medicine for sick family members, or forcing them to continue working without seeking medical treatment. The game brings up many different aspects of life in 3rd world countries. I’d love to see your thoughts about the game, and its’ depiction of life and the struggle to survive for these families.

3rd World Farmer

Working with Skin Surface Data

Yesterday in class we completed an activity that allowed us to estimate the surface area of the skin of the average middle school student. The data from that lab is available here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pckqYhcT1kJl8ASYUwG-KXw

Today we are going to take that data and graph it in Excel to see if there is a relationship between height and skin surface area. We will be using several different features of Excel, some of which involve math you have not yet learned, but you should be able to understand the implications of the math, if not the math itself.

By the end of class, you will have completed the following tasks:

• Created and Printed a Scatterplot of the data from yesterday’s lab
• Drawn a line of best fit (trendline) for the data
• Titled and labeled your graph
• Included the Formula and Regression (R²) line for your data on the printed graph
• Completed the questions related to the graph for your lab report
• Posted the estimates for Surface Area for two famous people to my blog, include the mathematical formula used to calculate their Surface Area.

To begin:

1. Ctrl+Click the link above to open the Google Spreadsheet of our data from yesterday in a new tab.
2. Go to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Excel 2003
3. In the Google Spreadsheet, highlight the cells that contain data (not the column headings)
4. Right click on the highlighted data and select copy (or hit ctrl+C while the data is highlighted)
5. In Excel, select the A1 cell, right click and Paste the data (or hit ctrl+v with A1 selected)
6. If your first row of data is off from the rest of the data, retype the values into the correct column.

Our data should now be imported into Excel.

To create a scatterplot of the data:

1. Highlight the data (if it is not already highlighted)
2. Click the Insert menu at the top of the program window
3. Select Chart from the menu
4. Select the X Y (scatter) type, and the first Chart Sub-Type
5. Click Next, twice
6. In Step 3 of the Chart Wizard, title your chart and axes as follows:
   1. Chart Title: “Your Name”’s Relationship of Height to Skin Surface Area Graph, replace “Your Name” with your name J
   2. (X) axis Title: Height in cm
   3. (Y) axis Title: Skin Surface Area (cm squared)
7. Click Next
8. Create the chart As a New Sheet in Excel

To draw a line of best fit (trendline):

1. Right click on a data point in your new chart.
2. Select “Add Trendline…”
3. Select the Linear Trend type
4. Under the Options Tab:
   1. Click Display Equation on Chart
   2. Click Display R-squared value on chart
5. Move the text box with the Equation and the R-squared value into an empty area of your chart.

Save Your Graph to Your Folder on the Server

Print Your Graph

Complete questions 1 through 3 on Skin Surface Area Analysis Questions Sheet. Question 3 involves you finding the surface area for 2 other famous people. When you have completed Question number 3, post a comment to my blog with the celebrities’ names, heights in cm, and skin surface area.

Once your comment is posted, complete questions 4 and 5 of the Analysis Sheet.