Connected Classrooms: Physics
Zoe Boekelheide, associate professor of physics, and her Demonstrating Science first-year seminar class joined Krista Yetter’s fifth-grade class at Cheston Elementary as part of Landis Center for Community Engagement’s Connected Classrooms initiative.
Concepts covered:
- Gravity
- Center of mass
- Applying gravity and center of mass while building a mobile
Feedback from Prof. Boekelheide:
“The topics of gravity and center of mass were chosen by my students. They spent some time looking through the various topics that grade 5 covers and chose topics that they were interested in and that they felt they could explain with interactive demonstrations. My FYS (First- Year Seminar) focuses on science communication, why it is important, and strategies that science communicators use to do it well. We do not cover much specific science content, and one of the things that students learn during the Connected Classrooms project is how much work it is to teach and explain science. Since the topics they choose are grade 5 level, they do make use of their own existing knowledge, but they also typically need to do some research on their own to make sure they have a deeper understanding of the topics they are trying to get across.”