A New Year Brings Fresh Ideas

One of the best things about being a teacher is of course the summers off, but more importantly is the fresh and renewed perspective.  The summer break is great.  I get to spend time with my family but it also provides me with the opportunity to dream up a whole new school year.

Last year, I flipped both my Honors and AP Chemistry course. (I would recommend that you flip your classes one at a time, although, now I am happy that I did.)  Last year, I was hoping to blog more about the experience, but I was way too busy creating the videos and I never got around to writing on my blog.  I have new things that I am going to be trying this year and I hope that I have the time to write my reflections here more regularly.

For a few years now I have been very interested in Modeling Chemistry.  From what I have seen it has a lot of potential and it sounds very interesting.  I was hoping to attend a local workshop on modeling chemistry, but for personal reasons I couldn't make it.  I am grateful to bgoeckner's blog Science Without Spectators. (Sorry, I don't know your name.)  She attended the conference and is providing a day-by-day description of what she learned.  I am so inspired.  While I am not I'm moving to 100% modeling classroom, I do plan on experimenting this year.

So that brings to the Marshmallow challenge.  Tomorrow is the first day of school and I wanted to start with something different.  I have always started by going over the syllabus and all the other boring stuff.  I found this on Science Without Spectators's blog, which was taken from The Marshmallow Challenge website.


The challenge is simple.  Teams have 15 minutes to construct the tallest freestanding structure that can hold a marshmallow on top made only from spaghetti, string and tape.  Check out The Marshmallow Challenge website for more detailed instructions and background information.

I am hoping that my students walk away from this exercise with:

1. ...the importance of and an appreciation for working in teams.
2. ...an understanding that sometimes you have to fail to learn something.  (Prototypes are important!)
3. ...the importance of planning and experimenting.

I am going to tie this challenge to my quiz re-takes.  Last year, I let my students re-take quizzes as many times as they needed.  (I can't believe I did that, but I am glad I did.)  My students really liked it and I loved the lesson that it is okay to fail as long as you get back up and try again.  To do well on the Marshmallow Challenge you need fail many times.  The trick is to look at what you did and make it better.  I want my students to know that success doesn't come easy and it doesn't come without failing and set backs.  I hope this is what they get from the challenge.  

I will have an update on the challenge in the a later post. 

I hope this year I can post more regularly.

Thanks

Dan