Friday, July 01, 2005
Avogadro's Number, PSSC-MIT and Slinkies in the Hall
Post Sputnik, the American culture looked at itself and thought - we are not educating our children right. We are not emphasizing science, mathmatics or engineering enough.
The Physical Science Study Group was formed and a lot of thought went into developing a method of teaching science in a new sort of experiential way. The new method was this -- set-up an experience and have the student be gently guided through all the steps to be observed. Have the student write and comment on their observations and then have them draw conclusions. Sort of have the student re-invent each major science concept based on what they experienced and observed themselves.
These 'experiences' were mixes of biology, chemistry and physics. For example, light was experienced through observing photosynthesis, spectrometry, diffusion grids and lenses. A student who was a good library researcher could find references to what they saw in the laboratory and find the original writeups by the famous scientist. To this day, I remember reading about Faraday's Christmas lectures to explain the physics of how a candle is blown out.
We did not have textbooks for our sciences classes. The material and methodology was too new. It came every week to the the school in a large box with 35 mimeographed copies of each new section. The lab apparatus set-ups were given like recipes -- 6 petrie dishes, 1 bunson burner, 4 mg of sulfur, 18 ml of acetic acid, mix throughly at 120 degrees F and observe for 4 days. Some times the boxes had new apparatus included.
One time we received our Monday morning science box, and took out a stack of 8 very thin one meter square pans. We were introduced to the concept of concentration - measured in two ways - as the ratio of solute/solvent or as solute/ solution. Two units of concentration expressing the latter ratio are: Molarity(M)=moles of solute/liters of solution and % by mass=(mass of solute/mass of solution) 100%.
Molarity is a convenient laboratory unit that delivers for a measured volume of solution a known number of solute molecules (i.e. moles of solute). Percent is a familiar concept to most people and for this reason percent by mass is used on many labels.
Now what makes these things memorial for me was the library research I dug into after making up a mole solution of table salt (NaCl) in class. You can not just attack this concept by looking up Avogadro's Number. You will get every citation in reference to this but no wiser about why it is called Avogadro's constant (did he calculate it or was it attributed to him in an honorary sort of way?). Wandering around about this subject introduced Gay-Lussac, Dalton and Lavoisier's work and ultimately to Dmitri Mendeleev and his periodic table. And 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd for the number of molecules of a substance in a mole solution of it.
Another Monday science box had 16 boxes of really long slinkies. We broke into groups of two, in the long aisles of the lab room as two-people teams we played with our slinkies. There was not enough room for all of us, so some of us went into the hall outside our classroom and stretched our slinkies.
One of us would hold the slinky motionless on one end and the other would introduce some rhythmic movement from their end and we would observe the effect of the movement down the slinky. We saw how waves moved, how they interacted with waves traveling back (cancelling or augmenting) and how much noise we could make with the linoleum floor.
I look back on this experience and know I learned the basics well. When I went to college and had to take all this basic science all over again, it was an absolute cake walk. I could walk into the twice weekly lab sessions, see the apparatus set-ups, see the materials. I could open my lab notebook, spend 10 minutes writing up the given experiment and walk out. Lectures were boring but only exercises in note taking. Tests were total rehashes of what we had covered in our high school science classes. I did not encounter any new material until I took upper division material in quantum and nuclear physics.
Later in life, when I would go into consultation meetings with the computer science professionals from Bell Labs or from one of our own electronic data processing organizations and they would open their briefcases and pull out their bound, page numbered 'scientist' notebooks, I always felt that they did this as a sort of intimidation display.
The bound 'science' notebook with its numbered pages is essential documentation for the experimentalist or the engineer who may be filing for patents and needs incontroverible proof of when an idea took shape. Some colleges forced their students to do all their laboratory write-ups in these sort of permanently bound books to instill the practice of keeping their all notes.
I just always thought it was an unnecessary affectation to come into a meeting in a white 'scientist' coat and pull out a bound book to take your meeting notes in. It certainly did not give these people added credibility in my eyes.
I worked at Chlorox once on a project under the head scientist (his literal title). We were making observations about a competitor's toilet bowl cake product (2000 flushes). For this project, I did have to do all my write-ups into a bound book and the book was placed in a vault every evening before I left for the day.
We got a toilet from a junk yard, set it up and flushed until the cake product dissappeared to prove that it took more than 2000 flushes to accomplish this. We measured the cakes out of the boxes for about 1200 samples to insure that the product met the quoted weight, plus or minus 10 mg. We measured the acidity of the product cake over its lifetime (day one, day five, day 10, etc.) to ensure that the product continued to work over its lifetime of usage.
Was this important work? Probably not. But my book was a neat and detailed documentation of what I did. I was trained well.
When I went back to consulting after I retired, I took along a bound 'scientist' book to make all my notes for each of the jobs I worked. Looking over them now, I see that they are lists of names and telephone numbers, business cards taped to the page, notations about next meetings, one or two paragraph summaries of meetings and prospective business rule notations or goals and objectives. I suppose they are meaningless in the long run, but they are scrapbooks for those days and times. I was self conscious enough to never bring this book into the actual meeting itself, but I did fill it in afterwards in the car or at my desk.
I think I always wanted to project the approachable and knowledgeable image to my clients. Whipping the book out on them would have sent up some barriers I think.
Making a racket with slinkies in the hall to see the physical effects of wave motion, finding Mr Wizard-like books at the Lawrence Hall of Science to use to play with my young kids, writing in official looking science notebooks were all residues from my encounter with the PSSG and its methods.
Here is an aside -- in the mid-70s, the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) became a resource for the San Francisco Bay Area science education mill much like the PSSG was for me in the late 50s.
The public elementary school mentally gifted minor program that my oldest daughter was part of for four years took their kids to the LHS every week during the school year. The final year my daughter was in the program, she was instrumental in getting the administrators to switch focus and buy monthly tickets to send the group to the Actor's Conservatory Theater and to the Children's Theater Workshop for shows and behind the scences experiences.
The other important science educational resource in the bay area is the Exploratorium. The Fernbank here in Atlanta is its equivalent.
I was lucky enough to have Chris deLatour as one of my teachers for one of my upper division college physics classes. Normally, I layed pretty low in my physics classes in college. I used my initials instead of my name to appear genderless on my tests. I never asked questions in class. I was the mouse in the corner, soaking up what the big impressive science teacher man had to deliever to us peons. Until Chris came into our classroom.
He was a young, tall man. He strode into the class, coffee cup in hand, put his foot on the edge of the display island in the front of the class and with a sort of effortless lift, was standing on the island looking down at all of us sipping his coffee. He wanted to see all the students, including the jocks lined up in the chairs leaning against the wall in the back of the room.
Because of my eye issues, I always sat in the second row and way to the left (I am almost totally blind on the left) so I could easily turn a little and see the full sweep of the classroom. The chairs had a wrap around desk plate on the right, and I am left handed. I could turn a little in the seat and write in my notebooks and not miss anything happening behind or to my left.
Chris introduced himself and then made each of us introduce ourselves to him, tell a little about ourselves and tell him what we wanted to be called. When he came to me, I just said my name, said I worked at PG&E (local gas/electricity utility) and that I didn't know what I wanted to be called. I answered to "mom" the most. For the rest of the term he called me 'mom' when he addressed me. At the end of that semester, he left the university and went to work as the assistant director of exhibits at the San Francisco Exploratorium. He was always interested in innovative ways to teach all levels of science.
Specific reference to Chris --
http://www.exo.net/~pauld/summer_institute/summer_day4+5light/lightbox_PD.html
General work using the Exploratorium as a science teaching resource
http://www.exo.net/~pauld/index.html
Anyway, as I was saying...
Did America learn to do a better job educating little scientists? Who knows -- you can't really tell from a sample of one -- me.
PS -- Here are some related articles about PSSC and other's experiences with it - as students, presenters, historical context and educational modeling.
As a student
http://www.nas.edu/sputnik/liao.htm
Our mimeographed textbook pages turned into
http://www.textbookleague.org/32pssc1.htm
Dirty Tricks - Women and Science
http://photography.about.com/library/weekly/aa050800b.htm
Problems with History and Science when used together in PSSC
http://www.bshs.org.uk/conf/2000sciencecomm/papers/duschl.doc
The Physical Science Study Group was formed and a lot of thought went into developing a method of teaching science in a new sort of experiential way. The new method was this -- set-up an experience and have the student be gently guided through all the steps to be observed. Have the student write and comment on their observations and then have them draw conclusions. Sort of have the student re-invent each major science concept based on what they experienced and observed themselves.
These 'experiences' were mixes of biology, chemistry and physics. For example, light was experienced through observing photosynthesis, spectrometry, diffusion grids and lenses. A student who was a good library researcher could find references to what they saw in the laboratory and find the original writeups by the famous scientist. To this day, I remember reading about Faraday's Christmas lectures to explain the physics of how a candle is blown out.
We did not have textbooks for our sciences classes. The material and methodology was too new. It came every week to the the school in a large box with 35 mimeographed copies of each new section. The lab apparatus set-ups were given like recipes -- 6 petrie dishes, 1 bunson burner, 4 mg of sulfur, 18 ml of acetic acid, mix throughly at 120 degrees F and observe for 4 days. Some times the boxes had new apparatus included.
One time we received our Monday morning science box, and took out a stack of 8 very thin one meter square pans. We were introduced to the concept of concentration - measured in two ways - as the ratio of solute/solvent or as solute/ solution. Two units of concentration expressing the latter ratio are: Molarity(M)=moles of solute/liters of solution and % by mass=(mass of solute/mass of solution) 100%.
Molarity is a convenient laboratory unit that delivers for a measured volume of solution a known number of solute molecules (i.e. moles of solute). Percent is a familiar concept to most people and for this reason percent by mass is used on many labels.
Now what makes these things memorial for me was the library research I dug into after making up a mole solution of table salt (NaCl) in class. You can not just attack this concept by looking up Avogadro's Number. You will get every citation in reference to this but no wiser about why it is called Avogadro's constant (did he calculate it or was it attributed to him in an honorary sort of way?). Wandering around about this subject introduced Gay-Lussac, Dalton and Lavoisier's work and ultimately to Dmitri Mendeleev and his periodic table. And 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd for the number of molecules of a substance in a mole solution of it.
Another Monday science box had 16 boxes of really long slinkies. We broke into groups of two, in the long aisles of the lab room as two-people teams we played with our slinkies. There was not enough room for all of us, so some of us went into the hall outside our classroom and stretched our slinkies.
One of us would hold the slinky motionless on one end and the other would introduce some rhythmic movement from their end and we would observe the effect of the movement down the slinky. We saw how waves moved, how they interacted with waves traveling back (cancelling or augmenting) and how much noise we could make with the linoleum floor.
I look back on this experience and know I learned the basics well. When I went to college and had to take all this basic science all over again, it was an absolute cake walk. I could walk into the twice weekly lab sessions, see the apparatus set-ups, see the materials. I could open my lab notebook, spend 10 minutes writing up the given experiment and walk out. Lectures were boring but only exercises in note taking. Tests were total rehashes of what we had covered in our high school science classes. I did not encounter any new material until I took upper division material in quantum and nuclear physics.
Later in life, when I would go into consultation meetings with the computer science professionals from Bell Labs or from one of our own electronic data processing organizations and they would open their briefcases and pull out their bound, page numbered 'scientist' notebooks, I always felt that they did this as a sort of intimidation display.
The bound 'science' notebook with its numbered pages is essential documentation for the experimentalist or the engineer who may be filing for patents and needs incontroverible proof of when an idea took shape. Some colleges forced their students to do all their laboratory write-ups in these sort of permanently bound books to instill the practice of keeping their all notes.
I just always thought it was an unnecessary affectation to come into a meeting in a white 'scientist' coat and pull out a bound book to take your meeting notes in. It certainly did not give these people added credibility in my eyes.
I worked at Chlorox once on a project under the head scientist (his literal title). We were making observations about a competitor's toilet bowl cake product (2000 flushes). For this project, I did have to do all my write-ups into a bound book and the book was placed in a vault every evening before I left for the day.
We got a toilet from a junk yard, set it up and flushed until the cake product dissappeared to prove that it took more than 2000 flushes to accomplish this. We measured the cakes out of the boxes for about 1200 samples to insure that the product met the quoted weight, plus or minus 10 mg. We measured the acidity of the product cake over its lifetime (day one, day five, day 10, etc.) to ensure that the product continued to work over its lifetime of usage.
Was this important work? Probably not. But my book was a neat and detailed documentation of what I did. I was trained well.
When I went back to consulting after I retired, I took along a bound 'scientist' book to make all my notes for each of the jobs I worked. Looking over them now, I see that they are lists of names and telephone numbers, business cards taped to the page, notations about next meetings, one or two paragraph summaries of meetings and prospective business rule notations or goals and objectives. I suppose they are meaningless in the long run, but they are scrapbooks for those days and times. I was self conscious enough to never bring this book into the actual meeting itself, but I did fill it in afterwards in the car or at my desk.
I think I always wanted to project the approachable and knowledgeable image to my clients. Whipping the book out on them would have sent up some barriers I think.
Making a racket with slinkies in the hall to see the physical effects of wave motion, finding Mr Wizard-like books at the Lawrence Hall of Science to use to play with my young kids, writing in official looking science notebooks were all residues from my encounter with the PSSG and its methods.
Here is an aside -- in the mid-70s, the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) became a resource for the San Francisco Bay Area science education mill much like the PSSG was for me in the late 50s.
The public elementary school mentally gifted minor program that my oldest daughter was part of for four years took their kids to the LHS every week during the school year. The final year my daughter was in the program, she was instrumental in getting the administrators to switch focus and buy monthly tickets to send the group to the Actor's Conservatory Theater and to the Children's Theater Workshop for shows and behind the scences experiences.
The other important science educational resource in the bay area is the Exploratorium. The Fernbank here in Atlanta is its equivalent.
I was lucky enough to have Chris deLatour as one of my teachers for one of my upper division college physics classes. Normally, I layed pretty low in my physics classes in college. I used my initials instead of my name to appear genderless on my tests. I never asked questions in class. I was the mouse in the corner, soaking up what the big impressive science teacher man had to deliever to us peons. Until Chris came into our classroom.
He was a young, tall man. He strode into the class, coffee cup in hand, put his foot on the edge of the display island in the front of the class and with a sort of effortless lift, was standing on the island looking down at all of us sipping his coffee. He wanted to see all the students, including the jocks lined up in the chairs leaning against the wall in the back of the room.
Because of my eye issues, I always sat in the second row and way to the left (I am almost totally blind on the left) so I could easily turn a little and see the full sweep of the classroom. The chairs had a wrap around desk plate on the right, and I am left handed. I could turn a little in the seat and write in my notebooks and not miss anything happening behind or to my left.
Chris introduced himself and then made each of us introduce ourselves to him, tell a little about ourselves and tell him what we wanted to be called. When he came to me, I just said my name, said I worked at PG&E (local gas/electricity utility) and that I didn't know what I wanted to be called. I answered to "mom" the most. For the rest of the term he called me 'mom' when he addressed me. At the end of that semester, he left the university and went to work as the assistant director of exhibits at the San Francisco Exploratorium. He was always interested in innovative ways to teach all levels of science.
Specific reference to Chris --
http://www.exo.net/~pauld/summer_institute/summer_day4+5light/lightbox_PD.html
General work using the Exploratorium as a science teaching resource
http://www.exo.net/~pauld/index.html
Anyway, as I was saying...
Did America learn to do a better job educating little scientists? Who knows -- you can't really tell from a sample of one -- me.
PS -- Here are some related articles about PSSC and other's experiences with it - as students, presenters, historical context and educational modeling.
As a student
http://www.nas.edu/sputnik/liao.htm
Our mimeographed textbook pages turned into
http://www.textbookleague.org/32pssc1.htm
Dirty Tricks - Women and Science
http://photography.about.com/library/weekly/aa050800b.htm
Problems with History and Science when used together in PSSC
http://www.bshs.org.uk/conf/2000sciencecomm/papers/duschl.doc
# posted by Dornar @ 2:12 AM 
