In optics experiments, you often need to create lines of light. You can do this with light boxes, but they’re expensive, and tend to have too many rays to be useful. Laser light boxes are great, but again, spendy.
One teacher recommends using laser levels. These are the things made to help you […]

Ok, it probably wouldn’t be very yummy, but here’s another hands-on activity you can use that’s rather Halloween-like. Called “Make a ‘mummy’”, this Exploratorium activity is a great way to demonstrate how mummification works, by drying out the tissue in a fish using baking soda. Egyptians used a specific type of salt to […]

With halloween fast approaching, it’s time to take advantage of a frivolous holiday to do some fun science stuff.
No post about Halloween would be complete without a reference to the Grossology site. Scroll down for “lab activities”: This gets high marks from one teacher who says, “It has the simpliest of the slimey […]

Got a unit on circular motion? You may want to use an activity with a centrifuge, to show how it separates substances of different densities. Even if you’ve got a commercial centrifuge, how might you instead do a hands-on activity to show the same thing?
Try mixing red colored sugar in cooking oil in […]

Do physics teachers have a role to play in teaching about population growth? One could argue that the study of physics is separate from the world of human concerns — it’s concerned with the physical laws governing how the world works. Our role is to educate students about these abstract laws. The […]

Want an SEM scan of your fingernail? This is too cool — a company called ASPEX will take an SEM scan of any object that you send them and pst it online. You can certainly find some intriguing stuff lying around your home or office to scan and send to them! Or […]

Today’s session is about using interactive lecture demonstrations to effectively improve your students’ understanding of concepts.
As I mentioned in my previous post, while students like demos, they don’t get the things we want them to get unless they predict the results of the experiement or somehow get involved. David Sokoloff showed how they have […]

This session is about how using discrepant (or “surprising”) events to teach physics

There’s quite a bit of evidence showing that students don’t really get what we want them to get from demonstrations, but they do like them. They get a lot more out of them if we ask them to predict the results of […]

A pretty standard lab for introductory physics is to chart what constant speed (or constant acceleration) looks like, and graph it versus time. There are all different ways to do this, but one is to use a ticker-tape timer, which I think is wonderfully cool. The idea is to attach a piece of […]

Wow, super cool. A group of schoolkids in Italy measured the distance from the earth to the moon using the delayed echo in the audio recording of Neil Armstrong’s famous “One small step…” speech.
From the article in Technology review
They used the open source audio editing program Audacity to measure the echo’s delay which […]