Dr. Eugenie Scott

As science educators are increasingly reporting attacks on climate change education, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is announcing that they will also be defending climate change science in public school science education.  Join us as Dr. Eugenie Scott explains this new initiative for NCSE by adding climate change to their portfolio in defending good science education.

Links:

• National Center for Science Education
• “US Teachers Offered Support for Climate Change Lessons” (the Guardian)
• Episode 15 – Expelled Exposed
• NCSE: “A New Poll on Evolution and Climate Change”
• NCSE: “Teachers Feeling the Heat Over Climate Change”
• Dr. Eugenie Scott Interview with “Flock of Dodos” filmmaker Randy Olson, October 2010 (YouTube)
• “Plate Tectonics is a Hoax!”

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

To kick off the new year, we invited Pamela Hines , senior editor at Science, to talk with us about science in 2011.  From the farthest reaches of the universe to the deepest mysteries of the cell, Hines highlights the major science breakthroughs of 2011. Listen to the episode to hear about these discoveries, and what we might expect to see in 2012.

Links

• Science/AAAS
• Science Magazine Editors
• Subscribe to Science (K12 Teacher Membership Requires verification of teaching status)
• 2011 Breakthrough of the Year
• “HIV Treatment as Prevention” (Science Abstract)
• “HIV Treatment Dramatically Prevents Heterosexual Transmission” (Science Insider)
• Hayabusa Mission Website
• “Australopithecus sediba May Have Paved the Way for Homo“ (AAAS News Release)
• “Malaria Vaccine Meets (Modest) Expectations” (Science Now)
• Laser Mosquito Killer (YouTube)

Science/AAAS cover art courtesy of Science/AAAS.  Readers may view, browse, and/or download material for temporary copying purposes only, provided these uses are for noncommercial personal purposes. Except as provided by law, this material may not be further reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, adapted, performed, displayed, published, or sold in whole or in part, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Featured image courtesy of lead author, Dr. Myron Cohen.

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Marcus Wohlsen

For the last episode of 2011, we talk with journalist and author Marcus Wohlsen.  Wohlsen is a science writer for the Associated Press who has received abundant praise for his recent book “Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life.”
Listen to the episode as Wohlsen talks about his book, the underground community of “biopunks” and how you might hack your biology curriculum.

Links

• “Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life” on Amazon.com
• “Biopunk” On Facebook
• Biocurious
• DIYBio
• “Biopunks Tinker with the Building Blocks of Life”, NPR
• “DIY ‘biopunks’ want science in hands of people”, USA Today
• openPCR
• Dale Carves a Turkey with Wikihow
• Winter Solstice for Wisconsin

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

David Shapiro

We welcome David Shapiro to the show to talk about his graphic novel “Terra Tempo: Ice Age Cataclysm”.  Shapiro is the creative director and writer at Craigmore Creations – a publishing house that specializes in Earth science and natural history stories.  In “Terra Tempo”, Shapiro’s young characters travel back in time to Glacial Lake Missoula and witness the resulting floods when the ice dam breaks.  Listen to the episode and engage your students in natural history with “Terra Tempo”.

Links

• Terra Tempo: Ice Age Cataclysm!
• Terra Tempo Trailer on YouTube
• Buy Terra Tempo at amazon.com
• Craigmore Creations
• Teacher’s Desk at Craigmore Creations
• Terra Nova

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Shiv Gaglani

Ever wanted your students to conduct scientific research?  Our guest this week has some insights for you.  A second place winner in the Intel Science awards in 2006, Shiv Gaglani is now a graduate of Harvard working to spur interest in STEM among students.  We talk with Shiv about his book (and website) “Success with Science”,  how to engage your students in scientific research, and the importance of STEM in our economy.

Links

• Shiv Gaglani’s Site: Success with Science
• Success with Science: The Winner’s Guide to High School Research
• Intel International Science and Engineering Fair
• Google Global Science Fair
• OpenPCR
• MakerBot
• HomerHickam.com
• Danika McKellar
• Science360 Radio
• Science360

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Mark Schober

This week we talk with Mark Schober about using Modeling Instruction in the science classroom.  As president of the American Modeling Teacher’s Association, Mark shares with us a history of modeling, how it can be used in the classroom and that it is for more than just physics courses.

Links

• Schober’s Physics: ModelingPhysics.org
• Contact Mark Schober
• Modeling Instruction in High School Physics
• Weblinks for Modelers (from ASU)
• American Modeling Teachers Association
• ASU Modeling Instruction Program
• Modeling Physical Science (UW-Oshkosh)
• Modeling Instruction from Frank Noschese
• Modeling Instruction in Physics channel on Vimeo

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Jamie Loizzo

Our guest this week is Jamie Loizzo, project manager for Purdue zipTrips™. A zipTrip is an electronic, interactive field trip that connects students across the country to scientists at Purdue University.  Through the experience, students are able to observe real-life science laboratories, research and science careers.  Listen to the interview and take your kids on a zipTrip!

Links

• Purdue zipTrips™
• Follow zipTrips on Twitter
• Find zipTrips on Facebook
• zipTrips on YouTube
• Jamie Loizzo, Project Manager
• zipTrips: Behind the Scenes (EzineMark.com)
• “Field Trips Go Electronic” from Post-Tribune
• “Electronic Field Trip Brings Science to Students“ (Farm and Dairy)

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Frank Noschese

This week we discuss teaching techniques with Frank Noschese.  Frank is a high school physics teacher at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y.  and an active blogger.  We talk with Frank about blogging, active student engagement, flipped classrooms, psuedoteaching, and the Khan Academy.  Join the conversation and leave your comments.

Preview from the Show:

There’s a lot of research and evidence to backup the fact that having a more interactive class does work.  And there’s a lot of ways to go about being interactive.  One way is with the questioning technique that you were talking about in the Harvard justice videos; I haven’t seen them, but it sounds like that’s one way.  Or using clickers is another way. Or with whiteboarding and modeling, where the kids are working in groups on these problems, and they’re working on them on these large whiteboards that maybe two or three kids can work on at a time, and they share and present their solutions to the problem.  So there’s lot of different techniques depending on the size of the class and the materials that you have, so I don’t think anybody should just be able to throw their hands up and say “well based on my situation, the only thing I can do is lecture”, because there’s always different techniques.

If you think back to even how you learned – something that you found you had to struggle through, whether it was a sport or an instrument, or a kind of arts and crafts, woodworking – anything like that.  You worked hard at it, got feedback from someone who knew what they were doing, there were lots of tests along the way to see if you were getting it or not.  That kind of interactivity and feedback is so necessary for learning.  And then there’s also people that say – we had this conversation on twitter a few months ago – where somebody said “but kids do learn from lecture, there are kids that are gaining.”  And it’s true, there are kids that do still learn physics through lecture, and what we think is going on there is that the kids are doing these active engagement strategies in their head, so they’re trying to think ahead: “what’s the next step this would take”, or “how does this fit in with that,” and they’re doing it in their head.  And these are very few kids that actually know how to learn from a lecture, and I would say the bulk of students just sit there and think that they’re going to learn from osmosis.

Links:

• Action-Reaction (Frank’s Blog)
• Frank on MSNBC talking about
• Frank on flipped classrooms with USA Today
• Follow Frank on Twitter
• Frank on the Web: Frank’s Posterous, Noschese 180, Win? Fail? PHYSICS!, WQDYH?
• Harvard’s Justice with Michael Sandel
• A Private Universe
• dy/dan (Dan Meyer)
• Geoset (Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology)
• Veritasium Science Videos

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Dr. Jonathan Osborne

Join us to kick off our 2011-2012 season by talking science standards with Jonathan Osborne from Stanford University.  As a committee member who helped draft the Conceptual Framework for New Science Education Standards released this summer, Osborne talks to us about science practices, crosscutting concepts and core ideas found within the framework.

Preview from the Show:

The intention of this document was that it would spell out the kind of broad framework of what it was that a science education K-12 should attempt to achieve.  And the framework… basically has conceptualized this really in terms of it being a framework for the practices, which are: what kinds of things do scientists do, what are the cross-cutting concepts that appear in all of the sciences, and then what are the core ideas?  And the core ideas are conceptualized in terms of life science, physical sciences, earth sciences, and what we may call ideas that are central to engineering. …This document will be used to write a set of standards, which will be the set of common core standards in science.

…there are these practices that scientists engage in: asking questions, analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations using modeling.  And therefore, you can’t really say that you’ve got a rounded science education or complete science education if you don’t spell out to students that this process of analyzing and interpreting data is something that is fundamental and key to science.

Education is about making people think.  It’s about interesting people in a topic.  It’s about engaging them so that they will pursue it for the rest of their lives.  Now I’m speaking to this kind of mythical parent here, but if you just want them to know the stuff – yeah, sure, they’ll know it for the test tomorrow.  But you’ll not be leaving them with the legacy, or enduring interest and love of a subject.  And do you want your kid to be someone who’s stimulated, engaged and interested in school?  Or do you want them to be someone who regards [school] as a boring place where all they have to do is get a lot of information shoved down their throat, regurgitate and forget it the next day?  At the moment, we do too much of the latter in science education.  And I don’t blame the teachers for that; a lot of it’s about the assessment and the ways in which that assessment has become high-stakes.  And there’s not enough space for making things and exploring ideas.  That’s what education should really be about – exploring ideas.

Links:

• Jonathan Osborne, Stanford
• Conceptual Framework for New Science Education Standards  The book can be read or downloaded at no charge from the National Academies Press.
• Committee on Conceptual Framework for New Science Education Standards
• Next Generation Science Standards
• Happy 5th Anniversary

Featured Image used with Permission from the National Academy of Sciences

To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.

Farmers fails physics

Yes, this is just a silly ad. I should relax and let it slide. Right? Then again, the insurance business is all about numbers, units, and equations.

Speaking of equations, let’s take a look at those numbers again.

A closer look at the numbers

The cow is a projectile launched at 70 degrees off the horizontal with an initial velocity of 42 m/s.

Oh no. It’s not just a little slip on a label; all the distances are wrong too.

Zip over to the Wolfram Alpha site for the correct answers.

Wolfram Alpha can solve this

Looks like I’ll be saving this image for my physics students to investigate. I guess it is back to school for Farmers.