Year 9 Practice lesson

Instructions

1. Place a single charge and tabulate the Voltage vs Distance (use Voltmeter)

2. Place second opposite charge a small distance away and tabulate and plot separation

Dr Hill

Earth Surface

North Pacific Gyre Junk from 5 Gyres on Vimeo.

Some stellar calculation

  These are the formulae provided in the HSC,

1. Draw a table that identifies each symbol , its units, and typical values
2. The following is a calculation relating to the brightest star in the sky




Visit this link to see a photo of stars with the m value calculated  If Cybele is 50 parsec away what is it the absolute magnitude

Personality of Rocks

Ask most people and they will typically tell you rocks are solid (Solid as a Rock) and that they are brown and boring.

Some observation and knowledge and rocks can almost speak to you telling their story....

But first we will look at this diagram which is almost the social story of a rock.  Any rock you meet will have come to you after wandering back and forth along the arrows.

Brown labels are types of rock, three basic groups. Green labels are for the dust and molten states of the material in between being rocks. Blue, and there is a lot of them, are events that happen to the rocks in their journey.

Best practice the old memory drill of taking notes from the diagram, clarifying your understanding, draw from your notes, and test again soon using notes of your notes.

When this is done its time look at themes like 'how plants ate the planet', 'Sydney a city on the bed of the biggest river in history', and 'Sticky particles, scintering sand'

Circuit Role Play

Analogies help understand Electrical Circuits. It is easy to show that if unlike charge attract, when you separate them chemically, through friction or by using a moving magnet, they then try to get back together.

Wires create an easy path for charge and it is possible to imagine electrons as trail of ants.

Getting Voltage, Current and Resistance requires a little more.....

The best role play is have students as conductors and resistors and join up as a circuit. The +ions are paper tokens that are passed around the circuit.  At the start of the battery the voltage of the charge is written (eg 10 V) they are passed through conductors at a rate so they don't accumulate.  Resistors are rated in Ohms, in modern symbols (eg R10 means that if +ions are rated 10 V and drop to 0 V they will pass at the rate of 1 a second)

Role play will explore series and parallel configurations. - Sequence

1. leader organize role play.
2. Write understanding
3. Construct Circuits and record on Excel after Quality control drill on components. 

Click to Run

Technology Lets Us See in the Dark!

Lessonlookup orienation - Chemical from lines, Two filters CI =  B-V  (-0.6 -2)

Course Notes

• Earth based observation

• Parallax
• Spectroscopy

• Determining distances
• Learn
• Do
• A.4.A solve problems and analyse information using:
   and to calculate the absolute or apparent magnitude of stars using data and a reference star
• A.4.B perform an investigation to demonstrate the use of filters for photometric measurements
• A.4.C identify data sources, gather, process and present information to assess the impact of improvements in measurement technologies on our understanding of celestial objects

Now in Australia we have the "Echidna" Telescopes

1. Robots place lenses with Optical Fibres on a live image taken by telescopes

                  a. While viewing, the robots place the next fibres down on the location of stars in galaxies, then swap plates.
2.The light is gathered and placed in a strip/line

3.The light is then sorted into colours by a diffraction grating. (2D)

4. The optical fibres bundle the star light into strips and deliver it to an image intensifier

5. The intensified light is the converted to electrons that are stored in pits,
6. After the electrons have accumulated the charge is bleed off in a linear queue to form the final image

What is the Difference between CCD and CMOS
CCD - charge builds up and is then drained out
CMOS - is a memory chip that allow read while expose, but extra memory read wires reduce active area.

Summary

Star                                                                    Generates light
Telescope                                                           Concentrates
Optical Fibre a star pick up                                 Picks out stars from image
Sky to line shaping                                              Generates line
Spectrum line to image                                         Creates spectrum
Image intensification                                            Intensifies
Image to digital signal                                          Collects and converts to digital image

Advantages
Spectra, and magnitudes taken all at once for comparison
Unwanted space filtered out
Light amplified, and stored, Image does not get over exposed
Image can be time sliced to take out drift and momentary disruption. (CMOS)
.

Scroll through this article and have a look at how the Japanese are Cherry picking and multiplexing the spectra, You can see the advantage of simultaneous scanning.

Homework Feeds

In a nutshell the teacher emails a contact called "homework" with a subject line outlining Who When What and it gets syndicated instantly to RSS feeds, Widgets and Apps of Students and Parents.

Why innovate an age old practice?

Well one answer is: the whole world is changing with the information revolution, moving information to people so they can access it when they need it.  This is opposed to people moving to the information.  Information is cut up, mixed and moved as needed. Students need to have this modeled rather than just hear about it.

Another answer is that the innovation is just part of a broader "Business Process Re-engineering" process.  The mobile technology station is a substantial advance on Interactive White Boards, using lessons learnt from High Tech manufacturing.  The in-class log system streamlines lesson planning, rolls, student feedback, lesson feedback and registration, cutting hours of administration time.  Lessonlookup.com merges programming with lesson delivery, exploiting folding lists which also builds on the understanding things are different with the information revolution.

As a researcher, I have had a few breakthroughs and this is one. I have really learnt to celebrate them at the time simply because it is fun.

Astrophysics with Pictures?

In 2005/6 I produced over 1000 images based on Science and Mathematics. I had finished up running a robotics company and was about to embark on a couple of degrees to become a classroom teacher.  They were a kind of personal notes as I finally got a chance to catch up on reading....

This is an picture of two planet transiting a rapidly rotating star, showing a blue shift on the section of star coming towards you and a red shift on the receding edge. This is a bit more relevant for pulsar and stellar cores - white dwarfs that can spin 100 - 1000 times a second.

This covers how we know the universe underwent faster than light expansion in cooling off in under 15 minutes after the big bang. We have been underdone with most of the starting fuel unused.

This shows the nuclear powered implosion wave that forms a black hole.

Mustard Gas in Glenbrook Tunnel

Mustard Gas in Glenbrook

A good 'angle' can really deepen understanding of any topic. A good context, can really unpack learning issues uncovered in class quizzes.  From a starting point of my class's general interest in dangerous gases, and there are general issues applying chemical equations.

Glenbrook is a village in a hidden valley 200m above Penrith and is absolutely full of history, even ghosts! Mrs Cook told me in 1997 about the day in WW2 the Army told every one to stay in doors due to a Mustard Gas accident.

Glenbrook's first train route was changed after a terrible accident with a run away train.  The museum at Valley Heights tells the story of casualties started up the Emu Plains Cemetery you first pass on the train.  The old train tunnel was so long (> 1 km) and small, the drivers would run out of air.

My personal experience of Gas Warfare was being briefed for the Gas Hut in Pukapunyal.  By 1983 the Army dropped the requirement just in time.

Frankly, I was shocked in 2009 to read that the British were the main driving force behind gas warfare in a plan to take Sevastopol in the Crimean war. Stories of prevailing winds being from German lines to Allied in WW1 just built a picture of a really insane practice.  In 2011 I found out during a visit to the Australian War Memorial that Australian Gas masks were full of asbestos.

I have just read "Chemical Warfare In Australia" by Geoff Plunkett  http://mustardgas.org/
With an article on the current use of the tunnel http://mustardgas.org/First-The-Military-Treated-Us-Like-Mushrooms-So-Whats-Changed.pdf.  It is simply an outstanding book.

I will return to this blog to write comments on a few of the accidents at Glenbrook, the Dumping of munitions at sea and later by Union Carbide that has rendered all of Sydney Harbor behind the Bridge unfit for fishing, and the thinking behind Gas and Nuclear Warfare.

Deep Space Travel to find a Better Earth -Play Dough

Twenty eight Western Sydney students (names changed for this article) are on a mission to find a better planet. They have been selected not because they are experts, but have been profiled as "Can do problem solvers".

"The Japanese Tsunami chucked an entire country, mountain ranges and all, 2 meters to the right.  This planet is definitely alive" said Jane Mitchells  leader of the "Planet Mechanics Team".  "We were expecting to hear the usual "The earth is a lump of solid rock", but were shocked to hear "The earth a lump of solid play-dough wrapped around a liquid center with a giant ball bearing in the center"

"At first it is was hard to think of solid rock as 'Plastic' but heat and tremendous pressure can get rock to squeeze about the mantle like tooth paste. It is only in the top 300 km, the so called weak layer rocks, that things stick and shatter creating earthquakes." commented Brodie who spends his weekends canyoning and caving. "The Blue Mountains, a hour out of Sydney is the world's second biggest Canyon system is my back yard."

"Abseiling then lie-lowing down the canyons is action packed. But in winter its colder, there is less light hours and you look out for dry canyons like Tiger Snake just up from my friends house.  It was here we got stuck behind so Sydney Uni Geologists back from Antarctica. Here is the quick story of Sydney:

1: 250 Million years ago, Lithgow was higher than Mt Everest but was near the South Pole.

2: Rain fall was x10 today, and a slow river ten times todays Amazon laid down 1 km thickness of river bed on top a a sizable seam of forest (now coal)

3. Australia drifts to the equator over a mantel uplift, creating the oldest volcanoes in Qld, working its way down to Victoria now creating the continental North- South Great Dividing Range. Including the Blue Mountains."

Many students travel down from the Mountains each day through Glenbrook Gorge.

They travel right through a mountain peak that has lift gently in last few million years, with the original creek still in place. A result of the Mantel hotspot.