Blog Final Checklist
-41 points available
- 5 pt extra credit project

Project Description: Using your blog, create an online exhibit that presents to an average person “how X works?” Included in your exhibit should be the following:

1. Clear introduction to your gadget, with pictures and a brief history of its invention table(s) to organize pictures of ALL the important parts, their functions, their connections, and hyperlinks to important definitions. (5 pts)

2. A deeper presentation of TWO key parts. (total 8 pts)

a. Provide a close-up of these parts with labels (2 pt)
b. Give a fuller description of each part's purpose (2 pt)
c. What is it made of? Describe the role of conductors and insulators in this part. (2 pt)
d. What important sub-parts does this part have? What is their purpose?(2 pt)
e. How do all the sub-parts work together to enable it to function? (2 pt)

3. TWO Big Scientific Concepts that help explain how your gadget works: (8 pts)
a.

Define the general term used scientists to identify the concept you are presenting? (2 pts)
b. Additional terminology: What key terms that are used by scientists explaining this concept? Provide terms and definitions for each. (2 pts)
c. Diagrams and graphs you found that help explain this concept (2 pts)
d. List your sources (2 pts)

4. Design and perform a scientific experiment that illustrates how one the concepts works. (20 pts)
a.

What is the “testable” question that the experiment is trying to answer? (1 pt)
b. Describe how you will test the question above. Provide a diagram or photograph of the experimental setup. (1 pt)
c. Identify the VARIABLES (independent, dependent, and controls) being measured, with an explanation of how you will measure each of them. (1 pt)
d. Identify the Independent variable. (1 pt)
e. How was the independent variable measured? (1 pt)
f. Dependent variable: (1 pt)
g. How was the dependent variable measured? (1 pt)
h. List your control(s) (factors kept constant): (1 pt)
i. Why are these control(s) necessary? (1 pt)
j. Perform the experiment and organize your results (data) in a way that someone else could easily understand. Perform enough TRIALS to ensure you have reliable data. Use an table if necessary. (1 pt)

k. Graph your data if appropriate (if graphing doesn’t make sense for your experiment, use another VISUAL method for showing your results). Include your graph on your blog with the following analysis: (1 pt)
i. In words, what does this graph tell you about the relationship between _______________________ and __________________? (1 pt)
(independent) (dependent)
ii. If x represents _______________
and y represents______________, the equation for this relationship is:_____________________. (1 pt, if applicable)
iii. Using this equation, it may be possible to predict____________________ (1 pt if applicable)
(come up with an end to this statement that makes sense for your experiment)
iv. For example: (come up with an example that uses your equation to make a prediction. Show all steps to solving your example problem) (1 pt)
v. How might your results be innacurate? What possible errors could have occurred that would lessen your confidence in your results? (1 pt)
vi. How might you change the experiment to reduce or eliminate these errors? (1 pt)

l. Your conclusions. Do your results lead you to an answer to your original “testable” question? Why/why not? Explain thoroughly using your data to support your claims. (1 pt)

m. A list of at least three further questions you still have after performing the experiment. (1 pt)

n. How does your experiment connect to the gadget you took apart? Explain in atleast one paragraph. (1 pt)

o. Provide links to other resources for further reading. (1 pt)

p. Include a bibliography that shows all your sources. (1 pt)

Extra Credit: Build a new gadget that applies the findings of your experiment. (5 pts)

1) Include pictures and explanation of your new gadget.
2) Explain how your new gadget works using the concepts you have explored.

Work where you are!

For those of you who are still working on the background concepts for section 4, please try to wrap up your research and move on to designing and performing an experiment.

For those of you who are designing your experiment, you should check in with me to see what equipment you will need, and whether or not you have identified the "testable question", independent, and dependent variables.

Perform your experiment and keep good records your data!

Possible experiments for folks...

In this section (section 4) of your online exhibit, you are designing an experiment to explore or illustrate one of the two key concepts that explain how your gadget works. Below I have listed some possible starting points for you...but please don't take these as your only option!

• Matthew and Ashley: Check this link out about creating a magnetic recording using magnets. Here's another one that allows you record music on a metal wire.

• Krystal and Matthew: Look here for an interesting idea on building an electric motor.

• Charles and Alexis: Try here for an experiment idea on the strength of an electromagnet.

• Steph: Here's an interesting one on CDs and DVDs using a laser. Here's another.

• Damian: Here's an experiment on computer speed. Here's a whole page of computer science related experiments, if you want to browse.

• Charles: Here's an experiment on wire thickness and electricity flow. Here's another testing the resistance of various materials.

• Diana: Here's some digital art...I'm still working on an experiment idea...let's talk.
  

Links to help with section 4

1. Copy and paste the post on April 11th into a post, and use it to structure your work on section 4 of your online exhibit.

2. The following links may be helpful as you do background research on the two scientific concepts that you will be exploring in section 4.

Interactive Concept Maps

• Electricity and Magnetism
• - Electric Motors
• - Household Electric Circuits

• Light and Vision
• Sound and Hearing

Wikipedia Topics

• Digital
• Digital Electronics
• Cathode Ray Tube
• Magnetic Tape
• Electric Motors
• Electromagnet
• Electromagnetism

Yahooligans Science and Nature

• Lasers
• Recording Technology History
• DVDs
• Magnets and Electromagnets
• Magnetism

How Stuff Works

• Cell phones
• DVDs
• Analog vs. Digital Technology
• Tape Recorder
• Computers
• - Hard Drives
• - Memory

The Physics Classroom

• Electric Circuits
• Sound waves and Music
• Light waves and color

Circuit: a site built by a high school student about computers...

• Binary Numbers and Chips

Topics and Ideas on Designing Experiments

• science made simple: a description of the experimental design process
• Sample electricity and magnetism experiments: This looks like an excellent site!

How to Organize Section 4 of your "Online Exhibit..."

Introduce the underlying scientific concepts that are essential to understanding how your gadget works.

Concept 1:

1. Define the general term used scientists to identify the concept you are studying.

2. Additional terminology: What key terms that are used by scientists explaining this concept? Provide terms and definitions for each.

3. Diagrams and graphs you found that help explain this concept

4. List your sources

Concept 2:

a. Define the general term used scientists to identify the concept you are studying?

b. Additional terminology: What key terms that are used by scientists explaining this concept? Provide terms and definitions for each.

c. Diagrams and graphs you found that help explain this concept

d. List your sources

Design and perform a scientific experiment that illustrates how one the concepts works.

a. What is the “testable” question that the experiment is trying to answer?

Describe how you will test the question above. Provide a diagram or photograph of the experimental setup.

b. Identify the VARIABLES (independent, dependent, and controls) being measured, with an explanation of how you will measure each of them.

Identify the Independent variable.

How will the independent variable be measured?

Dependent variable:

How will the dependent variable be measured?

Control(s):

Why are these control(s) necessary?

c. Perform the experiment and organize your results (data) in a way that someone else could easily understand. Perform enough TRIALS to ensure you have reliable data. Use a table if necessary.

d. Your conclusions. Do your results lead you to infer an answer to your “testable” question? Why/why not? Explain thoroughly using your data to support your claims.

e. A list of further questions you still have after performing the experiment.

Pulling it all together

Using your blog, create an online exhibit that presents to an average person “how X works?” Included in your exhibit should be:

1. Clear introduction to your gadget, with pictures and a brief history of its invention

2. Table(s) to organize pictures of ALL the important parts, their functions, their connections, and hyperlinks to important definitions

3. A deeper presentation of TWO key parts.

• Provide a close-up of these parts with labels
• Give a fuller description of each part's purpose
• What is it made of? Describe the role of conductors and insulators in this part.
• What important sub-parts does this part have? What is their purpose?
• How do all the sub-parts work together to enable it to function?
  

4. Introduce the underlying scientific concepts that are essential to understanding how your gadget workss. Design and perform a scientific experiment that illustrates how one the concepts works. Follow this link to see a fuller treatment of how this section should be organized.

Meet Neil Postman: Technology Critic

Bio:

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003) was a prominent American educator, media theorist and cultural critic. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University.

Inspired by the values of Classical and Enlightenment culture, Postman was something of an old-fashioned humanist, who in the face of extraordinary technological change in contemporary society held firmly to his beliefs that there is a limit to the promise of new technology, and that it cannot be a substitute for human values.

Postman was born and spent most of his life in New York City. In 1953, he graduated from State University of New York at Fredonia. He received a master's degree in 1955 and a doctorate in education in 1958, both from the Teachers College, Columbia, and started teaching at New York University in 1959.

In 1971, he founded the program in media ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education of NYU, attracting a large audience for his lectures and writings over the years. In 1993 he was appointed a University Professor, the only one in the School of Education, and was chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002. Among his students are noted authors Jib Fowles, Dennis Smith, and Paul Levinson.

Postman wrote 18 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles for such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Time Magazine, The Saturday Review, The Harvard Education Review, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stern, and Le Monde. He was also on the editorial board of The Nation.

Perhaps his best known title is Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), in which he deplored the dominance of US culture by the medium of television, his assertion being that by its very nature, television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideologies and more about image. Postman also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only passive information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He draws on the ideas of media guru Marshall McLuhan, to form a theory on how different media are appropriate for different kinds of knowledge, and describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures value and transfer information in different ways. He states repeatedly that the 19th century was the pinnacle of rational argument, truly being an Age of Reason. In this period, where the dominant communication medium was the printed word, says Postman, complicated truths could effectively and usefully enter the cultural life of the nation without oversimplification. Amusing Ourselves to Death was translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide.

Quotes from Postman’s Books

Quote 1: from Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York, Vintage Books, pp. 22-48.

“I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology. The "forum" that I think is best suited for this is our educational system. If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it. [1]

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion.

Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press. Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and losers

URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman

1. In this quote, Postman claims that “technological change always results in winners and losers.” He points to the printing press as an example. How does Postman think society changed as a result of the printing press? Who are the winners and who are the losers according to Postman? What changed as a result?

2. According to Postman, what is the relationship between technology and education? Does Postman think technology is a threat to education? How? Can education be used to stem the rapid advance of technology? How?

3. Do you think the rapid advance of the internet has resulted in winners and losers? Explain how you think it has changed, or will change, the nature of human interactions.