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Less Physics Mo Problems

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Why am I writing this personal entry? Well, it is not an attempt to gain any sympathy. It attempts to show what is possible if a clear intention and goal serve the learner's needs.  In May of 2022 just near the end of another fantastic school year, I do not remember what happened. But, I was unable to finish the school year and was unable to teach the following year.  Why? On May 21st, 2022, I fell down a flight of 16 stairs (luckily carpeted) from the 2nd to 1st story of our home.  I was found at the bottom of the stairs. I was found foaming at the mouth. This would lead to a 2-month hospital stay which included an induced coma because my seizures would not stop, several rounds of lumbar punctures, and relearning basic physical movements like something as simple as being able to roll in the hospital bed. Simply put, when I was admitted to the hospital, I was diagnosed as being “critically ill.” Please take a moment and read those words: critically ill. They are not terms...
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#IMMOOC Week 2: Coding is not Confidential

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As a physics teacher, I am constantly looking for new ways for my students to conceptualize their knowledge and experiment with it. For this reason, I am always on the hunt for great new simulations. PhET Interactive Simulations have been a fantastic resource for my classroom. They are a great way for students to manipulate variables and see the effect instantaneously. These simulations aren't the only place they would see digital representations of physics.

 Every platform game has some form of a physics engine in it that students get to interact with. In my classroom, one of the games students analyze is Angry Birds.

 As I think more about this process on using simulations, I feel that there is something missing. Yesterday at the Wisconsin ASCD conference, I was able to hear Agnieszka (Aggie) Salter speak about the passion her elementary students have for coding in the classroom.  I honestly know very little about coding.  In fact, I dropped a Java course in college after a week because I felt completely lost. With the rise of code.org and The Hour of Code, though, coding is now a powerful educational movement.  Seeing this work, I believe there has to be away to connect it to the physics we do in the classroom.

 Wouldn't it be great if rather than consuming another person's simulation, students could design their own.  It would be super primitive, but would give them a place to apply those concepts of forces and motion as they program movement. They would be recreating the rules of the physical world in a digital space. 

 Two years ago, I had an AP Physics student program this as a part of our Genius Hour projects.  



I don't expect to get anywhere near here.  But I know in 3rd grade I was able to program a turtle to move forward in logo on an Apple iie. Yeah, I'm old school.




One of the great moments of Aggie's presentation was the talk of coding as a work of learning from failure.  A program rarely works as intended the 1st time. The process of debugging one's own code or seeking assistance from a peer to help debug is apart of the coding culture. Isn't this exactly what we want in our lifelong learners? The ability to learn from mistakes and seek assistance from peers in the process. Let's start calling corrections, debugging. I look forward to having students debug assessments in my classroom.

 As I said before, I know next to nothing about coding. I've played with Spheros and Makey Makeys in Scratch, but I've never tried to model physics using code. So, yesterday I signed up at Code.org and plan on taking courses so that I can know enough to start doing what I'll be asking my learners to do.  Many of them will know much more about coding than me and can help us out. But, I hope by being vulnerable and letting learners that this is new for me to, we can take the journey together. 

 If anyone has other resources they'd be willing to share, I'd love to hear them.

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