Virtual experiments from Kinetic Books

Supplier: Kinetic Books, http://www.kineticbooks.com.

One of the challenges in tackling the declining popularity of science subjects throughout education, or seeking to increase the scientific literacy of those who will not be scientists, is how to make experimental science concepts accessible, fun and relevant. Tapping into the skills and environments which young people already inhabit is one very good way to tackle that challenge.

Kinetic Books offer a system of online or CD based textbooks and virtual labs; I was particularly interested in the Virtual Labs, and concentrated mainly on those. The system is explicitly designed for learning across a range of physics topics, but the way they are presented makes it very easy to incorporate selections from the material into other courses too. Mathematics, of course, is an obvious beneficiary, but scientific thinking components can be introduced or strengthened within other areas from social studies through critical thinking and public understanding of science to art history.

There is a core of instructional material, with good use of hypertext sidebars offering expanded information plus frequent check and stimulus questions. There are also links to material elsewhere, and graphically simulated experiments. It could be used as a self study resource pure and simple; there will be contexts in which that is appropriate, but for me the strength lies in the ease with which bite sized parts can be used to enrich other approaches.

The levels of mathematics involved encourage this second view. Learners do not need calculus, but are expected to be comfortable and fluent in manipulation of inverse quadratics. The interactive simulations, on the other hand, could be used alone to develop intuitive understanding at any level from infant school upward. Selecting portions in this way, I’ve experimented successfully with learners aged from 8 to 34. There is also the question of national differences in curriculum; British teachers would find frequent discontinuities between US and UK content if they tried to work exactly to KB’s structure without adaption.

For me, the simulations are the real centre. Using graphics to good effect they provide the opportunity for hands on experiment with a range of models which are difficult or impossible to set up physically, and hard to observe reliably.

The motion of a simple projectile can be modelled easily enough using a bouncing ball, but monitoring the velocity and position of that ball with any precision requires either video recording or specialised equipment and lots of time. Getting access to a helicopter is usually both difficult and expensive. Orbital mechanics are entirely beyond any realistic classroom or lecture theatre environment. Using Kinetic Books’ virtual physics lab, all three become very quick and trivially easy to explore, with unlimited reruns allowing deep exploration in the time needed just to set up a ball bouncing experiment.

The simple projectile is modelled as a cannon ball (one dimensional motion having already been covered beforehand). First it rolls out of the muzzle and falls vertically to ground. Then, by adjusting the muzzle velocity, the learner attempts to drop it into a pile of sand some distance away - unsuccessful attempts remaining on the ground where they land, as markers, while trial and error brings subsequent shots closer and closer until the sand pile is scattered by a direct hit.

The cannon starts in a fairytale Arthurian style castle, then later appears on a globe as Newton’s Cannon for the first introduction to orbital and escape velocities. After that, it is replaced by the moon - which, in a game style setup, must be restored to orbital velocity before it falls and destroys the Earth. Further simulations involve docking of two spacecraft on different orbits, the twin moons of Mars, and so on. The orbits concerned are not simple geocentric circles, either - Deimos, for instance, changes its elliptical motion in relation to both Mars and Phobos, its velocity visibly changing between perigee and apogee.

I’ve concentrated on projectile motion because it is a key part of the freely available trial material, but there are plenty of other topics - waves, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, light and optics - at levels from the concept of measurement to special relativity and quantum or nuclear physics.

Pricing is realistic in comparison to other resources, and can be managed in various ways to suit different usages - even light use will justify the expenditure on perpetual licences, and individual private copies are affordable by any student who already buys course books. The experiments rely on Java, Quicktime and Flash, but those are free downloads. I hit an initial problem with some of them not displaying correctly, but response from Kinetic Books to my call for help was prompt and effective - the solution is a simple tick box in Quicktime’s setup.

Nothing in this world is ever perfect, and a review wouldn’t be complete without mentioning a couple of minor reservations, and the textbook entry on SI units illustrates both.

The importance of “powers of ten” is presented, and 1000 metres in a kilometre is given as an example (though this is an American text, so be prepared for US spellings of “meters” and “kilometers”). The principle of ten to the power three as a standard spacing, however, is not made clear without following further links.

Then there is the embedding within a wider, nonscience cultural context. This is one of the things I really like about Kinetic Books, and a reason why I would recommend them, but it has its tightropes and pitfalls. For instance, while I am very glad to see the origins of the SI set in the larger picture of revolutionary France, I might have preferred students to decide for themselves, rather than be told, that the “revolutionaries were a little extreme (as revolutionaries tend to be)”.

But, I repeat, these are minor details in a well designed and thought out whole which I recommend.

I’m very grateful to Donna (see contributors page) for pointing me towards these resources.

Supplier: Kinetic Books, http://www.kineticbooks.com.

[Contributed by AbsentCat]

Sunstorm

Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Sunstorm. 2005, London, Gollancz. ISBN 9780575078017

This isn’t a book about computing or computers, but computers and computing are behind everything that happens in it. It’s a really cool book, even though my English teacher lent it to me. In fact, it’s the second book in a series (the first one, Time’s Eye, is cool too, but doesn’t belong in this review).

The sun is going to flare out and destroy everything on the Earth - not just humans but all life, even bacteria. Mostly, the book is about how this happened and how people try to prevent it. You don’t have to know anything about the science or the computing to enjoy it, but you pick them up along the way without realising you’re learning them.

There’s this weird genius on the moon who uses computers to do a load of maths to let everyone know that the sun is going to flare. That’s one of the ways computing comes into it, because he builds something called a computer model which lets him visualise what’s going to happen to the sun. I didn’t know about computer models before, and you don’t have to know about them, but I got really interested and read about them. His model doesn’t only tell him what’s going to happen though - he runs it backwards, as well, and figures out why it’s going to happen. Then you get a different sort of computer model, and that shows how a huge planet like Jupiter was catapaulted across billions of kilometres of space using gravity wells (I didn’t know what gravity wells were either - that’s another cool idea I learned from this book and then looked up afterwards).

But there’s other sorts of computing, too, not just maths and stuff. The internet has sort of grown up, and become an artificial intelligence, and been recognised as a legal person called Aristotle after an ancient Greek bloke. Then there’s another internet on the moon, and that’s not so big or complicated but it’s intelligent too and it’s called Thales. And finally there’s the huge sunshade they build to protect the earth and it has to be run by a big intelligent computer as well, so that becomes a person called Athena.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be an astronomer, or a physicist, or an army officer or a weird genius, or a mathematician. But this book made me realise that you don’t have to be a scientist to learn science and find it exciting, and that maths isn’t just boring numbers it can be used to do and understand all sort of exciting stuff. I can be someone who understands what those people are talking about. For instance, I stopped ignoring my maths teacher, and started talking to him, and he explained several things in the book using a computer. I was able to watch the big planet being catapaulted across space, and I could change things to see how they affected where the planet went. And my physics teacher used a computer to show me what Lagrange points are. (The big intelligent sunshade had to be on a Lagrange Point, where there is no gravity - there are five Lagrange Points round every planet or moon, and they’re an amazing idea, you can hover on them with almost no fuel, and I understand three of them now even if I couldn’t do the maths myself yet). You can find out about Lagrange points at Wikipedia

Because of this book I’ve started paying attention in maths, physics and biology, and found that they are exciting if you listen to what they are about instead of just assuming that they are boring. And I’ve started learning about computers, and what they can do, and the science programs that help me to learn about how the universe works.

One of the things I like is that several of the important characters are women, not just men like most books: the American president, the European prime minister, the British Astronomer Royal. So if you’re a girl you can see a future in this sort of exciting science for yourself even if the world doesn’t end! One of the women, an army officer called Bisesa Dutt who is the main person in book one and then helps to save the world in book two, is also British Asian like me which is better still.

There’s one slightly gross bit, in the middle, giving too much information about how you have sex in orbit, but it’s only one page and you can skip over it without missing anything.

[Reviewed by Lakshmi]

Kaylie & Matt investigate latent heat of fusion

At the time of this story, in 2001, I was a propationary year teacher. Encouraged to use open-ended experiment as a teaching method, I asked my class of ten year old year-5 pupils to investigate what happens over time to water placed in the freezer compartment of a refrigerator.

Each was given a spike-and-dial thermometer, and there were also five Xemplar PocketBooks (small, relatively inexpensive, rebadged Psion handheld computers; many similar machines are available now) available on a first-come, first served basis.

The PocketBook offer was taken up on only one machine - by Kaylie and Matt, a friendship-pair living in the same street. Assessed as being close to the bottom of the class ability range, their motivation for volunteering seemed a mixture of laziness and novelty interest. Accustomed to paper and coloured pens myself, I paid little attention to the low IT take-up.

Observation sheets were prepared in class, the plotting of results on graph paper discussed and practised. Matt and Kaylie sought help with design of a spreadsheet and, by the end of the lesson, had a computerised record form with automatic, auto-scaled plotting. Most of the pupils were, at this stage, interested in the experiment and eager to get started. I advised thermometer readings at roughly 15 minute intervals, then sent them home to experiment.

When they returned after the weekend, the difference in educational outcomes between paper and spreadsheet was marked.

Data were patchy, invariably oversampled in the first hour or so but increasingly sparse thereafter. Plotting had generally been abandoned early on. It seemed that my foray into experiential learning was a failure.

Kaylie and Matt, however, had been drawn by the automatic plot into enthusiastic continuous monitoring of the temperature curve. Matt said, in his write up: “we thot the flat bits was weird, so we looked then to see what it looked like. Then we looked again ever time it moved again.”

Conclusions drawn by most of the pupils were limited to a single figure (although it varied considerably from pupil to pupil) for the time taken freeze solid. Kaylie, having watched the data assemble, said that the water “nearly froze in about two hours, but then it stopped and thought about it for a long time.” I prompted with questions about what happened before and after the water froze; most of the class said “nothing” but Matt disagreed, saying that it “jiggled about”; Kaylie added that it “kept stopping and starting.”

The pair asked permission to import their handheld data into a desktop spreadsheet for examination during their lunch hour. Returning later, I was startled to find that these two supposedly low-ability pupils had entered all of the class data on their own initiative, plotting multiple graphs for comparison with their own. In an impromptu presentation to their class mates, they took over my role in the lesson to showed considerable insight into the probable significance of similarities and differences between the graphs. They had also merged the sheets (inventing x-wise data transformation in the process) and were eager to discuss the implications of model which they perceived in the resulting scatter graph. I had learned a lesson of my own; I now start any similar activity from computerised methods, rather than working up to them.

[contributed by Chandra]