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Full-Text Articles in Education
Modeling Potential Energy Of The Gaussian Gun, Leslie Atkins Elliott, André Bolliou, Hanna Irving, Douglas Jackson
Modeling Potential Energy Of The Gaussian Gun, Leslie Atkins Elliott, André Bolliou, Hanna Irving, Douglas Jackson
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
The Gaussian gun is an arrangement of magnets and ball bearings (pictured in Fig. 1) such that—when the leftmost ball is released—the rightmost ball is ejected at high speeds. The device has been described in several articles on energy education. The sudden appearance of kinetic energy offers a productive context for considering a range of challenging ideas: the often-counterintuitive relationship between force and potential energy, the escape velocity for attractive forces, why energy is required to break bonds, and why energy is released when bonds form. Beyond these ideas, it is also useful for motivating the representation of a potential …
Expect The Unexpected When Teaching Probability, Karen Koellner, Mary Pittman, Jonathan L. Brendefur
Expect The Unexpected When Teaching Probability, Karen Koellner, Mary Pittman, Jonathan L. Brendefur
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
Probability has recently made its way into many textbook series and standards documents (NCTM, 2000; NGA, 2010). When students engage in probability problem solving many unexpected situations can arise due to the counterintuitive nature of probability concepts. These situations can be difficult for students and challenging for teachers to analyse during teaching. Recently, as facilitators of a Mathematics Science Partnership grant workshop on probability, we had the opportunity to engage middle school teachers in professional development workshops as well as in their classrooms. In this article, we discuss a rich probability task used with these teachers along with two scenarios …