Data Portfolio Implementation Plans for VT Center Teachers

The Virginia Tech Center's first workshop concluded with a Cosmic Ray eLab poster presentation as well as an opportunity for the teachers to browse the Data Portfolio and start to plan how they could use these activities in their own classrooms.

All of the teachers see possibilities to use activities such as the Penny Mass Histogram Lab for teaching introductory science topics, such as scientific method.

Plans were discussed to use the ZBoson and TopQuark Mass activities, the Quark Workbench, and the Cosmic Ray eLab in physics classes sprinkled in various places in the curriculum of our physics teachers. One of the teachers teaches IB Physics, and is particularly excited to use some of these activities as long term projects.

The Data Portfolio activities can also be applied to chemistry, astronomy, biology and earth science classrooms. Our teachers in these fields are planning on implementing Rolling with Rutherford and modifying it to also simulate the gold foil experiment, using the Dice Probability Lab to model genetic probabilities, Muon Lifetime can be used in chemistry and earth science to model half-life and radioactive dating and decay, LIGO eLab and Cosmic Ray eLab can be used in astonomy as well as earth science!

Our planned next workshop will be at the end of July (27 and 28); the teachers will have time at this brief workshop to flesh out their lesson plans involving all these Data Portfolio activities! We look forward to hearing how these lessons work out in their classrooms.