Classroom Activities
Creating a Base-Ten Scale
Students will create a customized base-ten scale using their age (i.e., days, months, or years) as a base unit and make comparisons along six orders of magnitude. For example, a student that is 16-year-old would have a base unit of 16 and would provide three temporal examples of increasing magnitude (160, 1,600 and 16,000 years) and three of decreasing magnitude (1.6, 0.16 and .016 years).3 This inquiry-based activity will allow students to compare quantities using scientific notation and refine their base-ten arithmetic. In addition, this activity will provide a temporal context that will enable students to grasp orders of magnitude. The base-ten scale will be peer evaluated using a rubric with a gallery walk.
Measuring lengths with variance / Decomposition of a meter
The ability to accurately measure and report precise quantities is a skill that is fundamental to all disciplines of science, especially physics. Students will participate in a series of measurement labs that will examine base-ten in relation to the metric system and practice measuring objects of various lengths. Groups will be given an assortment of objects with rulers at different levels of precisions and accurately report lengths in scientific notation. Each group will have the same objects with different instruments of precision; some may have a ruler with inches others, a ruler with centimeters or millimeters. Students will share their results and discuss possible errors that may have arisen due to instrumental error. In addition, students will perform unit conversions to determine how accurate each group’s measurement was, relative to their own. These inquiry investigations will elicit discussions on the importance of measuring in relation to relative error and rounding.
Comparing orders of magnitude in the electromagnetic spectrum
During the third advisory students will compare EM waves along the logarithmic scale, investigating patterns in wavelength, frequency, and energy. Comparisons will be made broadly, examining the overall range with each type of EM wave. In addition, students will take the geometric mean of the upper and lower limits of wavelength for each type of EM wave and compare different parts of the spectrum to more precisely determine differences in the order of magnitude of wavelengths for these different types of radiation. Inferences will be made about energetics for each EM wave and their application.
Comments: