Chapter 3 Log

Chapter 3 provides many resources that I would be able to use with my future class. Interactive Physics is a really neat tool that can be used to simulate physical phenomena. Upon looking at the website, I noticed that it was used in researching baseballs hit at the San Francisco Giants' ballpark - information I remember reading about years ago when the findings were released! Playing around with the free Flash simulations was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the air projectile simulator. It would be great to use with students, in a setting where teams of student scientists could hypothesize about many different things, such as which flight would be the quickest or take the longest, which would go the highest or lowest, or which would reach the farthest or remain closest to the launch site.

I was surprised and excited to see SimCity listed as being useful. When I was in fifth grade, we were allowed to play SimCity 2000 on the computer when we had finished our reading on certain days. About once a week we would have discussions about what had been going on in our cities and how we addressed any problems that arose. We learned valuable lessons, like the fact that sometimes it's hard to please everyone but that solutions can be found, or that while people like fancy things, they usually get very angry if you try to take away an historical site (or tax them to pay for things!). We sometimes got strategies from each other and would learn that there were certain ways to try and reason through problems.

In second grade, my best friend Adam and I used to play a game called Gizmos and Gadgets. This game required us to rationalize what instruments and tools to use to get a job done properly. We had to build cars to win races, and along the way we discovered principles of aerodynamics (always, always use the pointed front for the car) and uncovered a basic notion of how mechanics and simple machines work. It appears the game is no longer in print, but I would definitely try to obtain an old copy, if I could, for use in my classroom.

I had never heard of BioBlast, but I checked it out and it seems like something that would be really useful for students to use in order to begin to rationalize and, as the book says, abandon preconceptions. However, the link provided in the book and on the NASA website (one and the same) does not work. I really wanted to try it out for myself!