Modelling, RIOT, and Jerk

Modelling means building and evaluating conceptual models to represent phenomena, and there seems to be a growing consensus that this is one of the core skills we're trying to teach students. In this month's The Physics Teacher, a team associated with the Compass Project at Berkeley detail an activity in which new university students build models in an attempt to understand the famous "slinky drop".

Another exciting paper from TPT is about the Real-time Instructor Observing Tool [RIOT] built by Paul and West. RIOT is a protocol and application that makes it easy to track how instructors are interacting with students. It works especially well for classrooms with a lot of active group work. I've been using it to track TAs in introductory university labs, for example. I think the best parts are the reflections and conversations it inspires, and the paper provides an example.

There's an interesting paper in IJSE that looks at results from a sort of digital textbook that includes captioned videos, text-to-speech, vocabulary assists, and so on. They find that English language learners and students with learning disabilities perform at the same level as their peers.

If you're interested in how we confront students' paranormal beliefs, there's a paper in Science & Education in which a university lecturer applies a barrage of surveys during a course on science and critical thinking.

Seen on the web:
This week's #iteachphysics chat about jerk and higher-order derivatives of motion was really good.
This brilliant gif showing centripetal motion.
Falstad's excellent ripple tank and circuit simulator got a few mentions.
Justine Walker has been posting gifs of dancers in simulated lunar gravity.
Yusuf Eren put a wing sideways on a dynamics cart.
The STEMcoding project is running summer workshops for teachers.