Bringing Down the Bieber Bunny

I guess I’m kind of like the Flavor Flav of ed blogging these days. I’m just the hype man for people better than me.^[1]

After reppin’ Dan Meyer and the glory of WCYDWT, I tried out some really loose inquiry, a la Shawn and Frank and David and others. I’ll admit, one of the reasons I took on a third prep with physics this year was so that I could try out stuff like this. I do have some questions and some reservations about the experience, and would love some feedback.

We had already done a pretty extensive look at free fall and then had done objects fired directly horizontal. Now it was time to put them together.

First, we had a day of exploring projectile motion using this Projectile Motion Applet

I really just wanted them to mess around with it and make some observations on what happens when you change the initial velocity or the angle or the mass. They kept detailed notes of the distances, heights, and times for each and were able to determine where each of them was maximized.

The next day, we discussed the results as a class. What made sense, and what didn’t? Why did changing angles change the distance fired or the height obtained?

Finally, the last day was the money day. At the beginning of class there were two desks at the front of the classroom. I told them that they were exactly 4.5 meters apart.

The ONLY nice piece of lab equipment I have.

I showed them this: and told them that it had 3 possible firing speeds: 4.3 m/s, 7 m/s, and 9.8 m/s and that you could change the firing angle. I put it on one desk.

Then I showed them this:

It sings and dances better than the real Bieber!

and put it on the other desk, which got them super excited, because apparently 11th graders in Brooklyn do NOT like Justin Bieber.^[2]

All I said was, “Your goal is to hit the Bieber Bunny. Go.” They really jumped at this, much faster than I’ve seen them do before. To be honest, typically they are very passive learners, probably from the years of being taught in the NYC school system. In previous labs, they will play along with doing with whatever it is they are told to do, but they really want to be told what it is they were supposed to learn from the activity and will only do exactly what the lab says, never experimenting or playing around with parameters. There wasn’t really the impetus to learn. They don’t like the messiness that inquiry brings, so I’m glad that this worked well (kind of, and I will talk about that in a bit).

Within a few minutes, a couple students came up with some angles. I told them to convince me why it was right. They pointed out some calculations, I argued with them a bit about what we had learned about objects moving horizontally, and they realized they had missed some stuff conceptually and went back to calculating. Another student came up and he gave me some good reasoning and, even though I saw some algebraic errors that made his final answer way off, I let him fire. After it only went half the distance to the rabbit did he look at his work confused and then realize why it had gone so short.

One of the great things about this was that I could really see the different learning styles of my students. Some were at the whiteboard scribbling all over the place, others were doing hard thinking about concepts and really trying to think through everything before attempting an answer. Also, they wanted to work harder than they’ve worked before. I was expecting a lot of trial and error, but one kid really dug in for an elegant solution:

I mean, that is beautiful.

I actually almost blew it with him. He is one of my favorite students, because he reminds me a lot of myself when I was in high school. He never has to try and will just ace every test he takes. He never shows work because he doesn’t know the formulas, he just thinks of everything conceptually and invents the formulas every time he needs to use one. Like this one, for instance. He had reached the point where it said sin x cos x = .450459189, and was kind of stuck, so I was about to tell him to use a trig identity if he was insistent on coming up with a formula for x, and he yelled, “I can use a trig identity!” and went to use my computer, found that sin 2x = 2 sin x cos x and so he multiplied .450459189 by 2 and replaced sin x cos x with sin 2x, and solved for x. Amazing.

Here is some video of a victory shot:

Here’s the thing: they just wouldn’t stop. After school, a couple of kids sheepishly slinked in. Can we try to shoot the bunny some more? They kept tinkering. It got shot a couple of times using the medium range (7 m/s), so then they bumped it up to high range (9.8 m/s) and solved for new shooting angles. Then, because they had discovered that complementary angles will shoot the same distance, they started messing with it so that it would go over my lights and arc down and hit the bunny. So they started measuring the height to the ceiling and solving for the maximum height to make sure it would fit, finding where the projectile would hit its maximum height and realigning the setup to allow for it to all fit in my room, and went to town. Then they found the maximum distance that the projectile launcher would shoot and went to the hallway to shoot some more. I had parent-teacher conferences that night, and had to kick them out after over 2 hours so that I could set up my room. A couple kids were emailing me that night, asking questions or saying that they had been using their calculations in the virtual projectile lab to test their calculations and wanted to try it again the next day.

So, I’m super excited about the experience. Already, kids are telling their parents about what they’ve done in class, or telling other students who are now totally jealous that they aren’t in physics, and it feels really good. Here is what I love about it: the investment is really high because the motivation is really high. Every kid wants to shoot the bunny because it is just inherently fun. Also, it has so many ways to grow for advanced kids, the ones who are typically so bored in their classes that they just don’t do any work.

Here is my problem, though: I have a really wide range of ability in my class. The geometry teachers didn’t teach trig last year, so a few of the students were totally left behind in even the component vectors because they didnt have the prerequisite knowledge. They still had fun watching others try, but I’m not sure how much they actually gained by the experience. I had some more scaffolded problems for them to work on, but I really don’t want to do that, because it’s a worksheet and I would love to get away from that when the inquiry is available, and I don’t see how that helps them “get it.” One girl actually called me over and said, “I don’t know what is going on.”

So, my question is, how do you make inquiry a valuable experience for everyone? And I don’t mean fun, but actually a learning experience? I can guarantee a half dozen kids got no more out of the experience than if I had lectured on projectile motion. Is it in the grouping, or scaffolding, or what?

Also, how much do you guide or restrict students? How many errors do you let them make? I thought it was a good call to not let the ones who had made the conceptual error shoot because they hadn’t thought through everything (they had basically not viewed horizontal and vertical components as separate things), but let the one who made computational errors go. Now I wonder if I shouldn’t have let the conceptual errors shoot too, so they could actually see why it was wrong.

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I can totally see Shawn as Chuck D. I imagined Dan as more of a Mos Def, unless he insists on staying West Coast, in which I’ll let him be Del tha Funky Homosapien. I guess David is Rev Run? BACK

As opposed to 11th grade math TEACHERS in Brooklyn, particularly ones in private schools. Who may be named Sam. BACK