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Newsletter Volume 2 |
Fall 1997 |
The Arizona Science Center's Inquiry-Based Science Camps
Derrick "Blake" ParkArizona State University
Early Childhood Education
Pre-service student
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Newsletter Volume 2 |
Fall 1997 |
My experience working as a student assistant for the first part of this past summer with the ACEPT workshop was very rewarding in many ways. First the insights I gained while working with the experienced K-12 teachers will be invaluable to me in my professional career as a teacher. The ACEPT Workshop also gave me the opportunity to work in teams with teachers and college faculty, to learn how to operate a TI-83 graphing calculator with a Calculator-Based Laboratory (CBL) and various probes. I also learned how to operate a digital camera for the first time. In fact I became the camera man for the ACEPT Workshop, taking pictures of the apparatus that the faculty/teacher groups created. The pictures were uploaded to a computer and converted into gif or jpeg formats for use in the ACEPT Workshop Modules on the World Wide Web.
I really was not sure what to anticipate for the Workshop, but I know now that much of what I learned this past summer while working at this Workshop I will be able to use in my classroom when I become certified as a schoolteacher in 1998. As enjoyable as it was, the ACEPT Workshop did not compare to the fun I had as an ACEPT Pre-Service Intern at the Arizona Science Center Science Camp during the second part of the summer. I really got excited about the opportunity I had to teach a class of e ight and nine year olds this past summer.
For the first week of Summer Science Camp, I assisted a lead teacher with a class of four and five year olds. During the second week, I became the lead teacher in a classroom of my own. While preparing to lead my class session, I was both nervous and excited at the same time.
The first day I led a class of eight and nine year olds in a study of ant farms. We began by giving each student his/her own ant farm to put together. The students went outside and spent much of the morning with me collecting their own ants in and around downtown Phoenix. The point of this experience for the children was to introduce them to the concept of networks. That experience on the first day of leading a Summer Camp class as an ACEPT Intern at the Arizona Science Center already greatly reinforced my enthusiasm to become a school teacher!
The second day of leading my Summer Camp class, the students disassembled different "machines". One group was given a toaster. Another group took apart a wall clock and a hair dryer. A third group was given a scale. The fourth group had a computer keyboard. The fifth group was given the CPU of an old computer. To cap off this "disassembly derby" which gave the students valuable hands-on insights into the workings of various equipment, the students were thrilled to learn that they could take home any parts of their disassembled machines that they wanted.
Later that afternoon I challenged my class by giving each group a large container with masking tape, wooden dowels, aluminum foil, string, wooden and plastic blocks, flat wooden planks two feet long, plastic cups, small plastic trays that strawberries come in at grocery stores, tubers and zots, pullies of various sizes, ladles of various sizes, and a few other items you might find in your kitchen. I then challenged these eight and nine year olds to build a machine that would make a stuffed toy frog move. One group was to make the frog move three feet in one direction. Another group was to make their frog jump six feet in the air and land on a target. The third group was to invent a way to make its frog increase its speed, or accelerate, from rest. Another group was to have their frog climb over an object without falling down. Although the students had more than an hour to complete their machines, they became so involved in the creative process that when it came time to present their final product to the rest of the class, they pleaded for more time to finish. Each group was successful in developing a machine that achieved the goals set for them.
Blake Parks, ACEPT pre-service student intern with REU students Amanda Beasley and Jennifer Heidema, perform a pendulum experiment during the ACEPT summer workshop.
Next we spent a day exploring Bernoulli's principle. We began with the students sitting on the floor in a circle, with the room lights turned off, around a lit candle situated upright in the center of a paper plate. I challenged the students to blow out the flame using a funnel. I picked a very self-confident volunteer and handed her a large plastic funnel. She placed the small end in her mouth and aimed the large end of the funnel directly at the candle flame. No matter how hard she blew, she and the class were amazed that she could not blow out the candle. This experiment threw the class into complete disequilibrium. They could not believe that the candle could not be blown out! I assured them that it was not a trick candle, and gave another student a funnel of a different size to see if he could blow out the candle, to no avail. To give all of the students a first-hand experience with this aspect of Bernoulli's principle, I passed out funnels to everyone, had them lie on their backs on the floor, and challenged them to try to blow a ping pong ball upward and out of their funnels. They tried as hard as they could, but no one was successful. At this point of complete frustration and puzzlement, I led the class in a discussion about Bernoulli's Principle, and to the explanation of the phenomenon that most of the air passed around the ping pong ball as the students blew air through the funnel. This prevented sufficient air pressure to build up behind the ping pong ball to push the ball up out of the funnel. The same explanation applied to the flame which remained lit because most of the air passed either over or by the flame, limiting the amount of air pressure building up in front of the flame. These experiments provided the opportunity for me to apply Bernoulli's Principle to the design of airplanes. This in turn led naturally to the next activity which was to have the children build their own paper airplanes.
Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed working as an ACEPT Intern at the Arizona Science Center. It was both a rewarding and an exhausting experience, and I learned a lot about myself, students,teaching, and science. I highly recommend to other pre-service teachers serving as an ACEPT Intern, to teach science at the Arizona Science Center camps. I am also grateful to my NSF Teaching Scholar mentor and the Arizona Science Center for giving me the opportunity to be an ACEPT Intern.
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