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Show the Physics

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200 pointspillars7 comments

This is amazing, they treat demos as mini-inquiries: predict → observe → explain. I’d like to spin up open, libraries for chemistry and biology with the same spirit (prediction prompts, low-cost kits, failure modes, disposal notes, and paired sims/datasets for no-lab classrooms). If you’ve got experience running Shakhashiri-style demos, PhET-like sims, or school lab safety, jump in—let’s draft the minimal spec and seed the first 10 experiments.

Several years ago, I spearheaded an effort to just take the PhET sims and get them into an online school’s physics and chemistry curriculum (without even doing any development of new sims, I was trying to keep the cost close to zero).

It was like pulling teeth. Folks in education are highly skeptical of these kinds of things unless you can show hard evidence of their efficacy (which is fair, we shouldn’t be afraid of having our methods evaluated). But as much as this kind of simulation-based learning feels like it should be better, in practice it’s difficult to actually demonstrate that it is. If you’re lucky, you get to train some teachers ahead of time, do an A/B test, get back the results, and it’s a non-statistically-significant mess. In the end, my PhET efforts got crunched in the gears as the curriculum updates I was building them into got cancelled for other budgetary reasons.

I still believe these kinds of tools must be good for something, it feels ridiculous to think they aren’t. But one hazard I have definitely observed: People who already know the concepts being taught tend to love these things for the elegant way they demonstrate the principles, but actual learners who don’t know the concepts yet don’t always feel the same way.

That’s because they aren’t measuring the most important part. Actual interest. Kids might not get higher grades for the same test, but if they enjoy the subject more, think about it more, later they might revisit or remember it better than whatever they studied for a test once.

Evidence based really isn’t that good of a methodology when it comes to human behaviour

I used PhET Circuit Simulations in a classroom of 14-year-olds. Luckily, I had: (1) the freedom to space the tasks over a number of hour-long lessons; (2) plenty of equipment to also build the circuits; and (3) a lab assistant to make sure the multimeters were working. The PhET simulations allowed the students to construct circuits before setting them up with actual wires and resistors. Also, I could see which students completed the PhET simulations first and move them over to setting up the actual circuits. They worked as a couple of groups to build the physical circuits while the slower students kept working on the PhET simulations.

I helped those students who were building physical circuits, helping them to remedy their missteps. Then those students became group leaders once all students moved on to building physical circuits. Each group would always have some difficulty, but having "experienced" group leaders meant there were far fewer problems for me to solve.

A key understanding was that there were always discrepancies between the theoretical results of the PhET and the actual results from the physical circuits. The main source of these discrepancies was simply explained as the extra resistance provided by the wires. Evaluation was accomplished by the students building different circuits that I drew on the whiteboard and writing a report that included a photo of their group with their circuit(s).

This must be the dream resource of every physics teacher.

I was taught by Freek, one of the authors, in my freshmen year of undergrad physics. Great teacher!

From the first experiment: Scientists get excited when something odd happens because that means they don’t understand it, so there’s something to be learned!

This is the sentence scientists should be repeating over and over again.

In the years I was an active member of the skeptics organization, the first argument provided by the astrologists, homeopaths, telepaths etc. was "you do not have an open mind and cannot get beyond your science". To what I replied that if someone shows me something that cannot be explained by science, I will immediately switch to that in my PhD because, you know, Nobel prize. 30 years later and without a Nobel prize, here I am still waiting :)

Scientists would go wild if there was something that big nit explained by science (I mean that there are plenty of things we do not know for many reasons, but macroscopic events wild be insane to witness. The closest I can think of was cold fusion.)

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