AP Biology
Students designed an experiment to measure the effect of different concentrations of coffee on onion root tip growth. The goal of this lab was to learn how to apply statistical analysis (A Chi square) to help with validating our conclusion that the coffee treatment really did make a difference in growth compared to the expected control average, or could have the difference seen occurred just by chance?
AP Physics I
It has been a busy and challenging 1st semester for the AP Physics 1 students. The students are in the midst of doing a wide range of activities, including inquiry-based investigations, to cultivate their understanding of physics as they explored kinematics and dynamics.
Studying AP Physics 1 requires a tremendous amount of effort and determination. Fortunately our students are fortunate to have multiple online resources to help them as they explore Physics concepts. The class uses WebAssign as one of the resources. Using WebAssign allows the teacher to create assignments online and electronically transmit them to the class. Students enter their answers online, and WebAssign automatically grades the assignment and gives students instant feedback on their performance. The teacher is able to monitor the progress of each student in real time. It is also possible to identify specific Physics problems with which the students are struggling. It is also possible to perform an online lab using videos as source of data. This eliminates the need for complicated lab set up for some experiments.
Khan Academy is another resource that is available to the students for this class. The students are encouraged to use this site as a source of additional instruction and exercises. They are told that it is not a substitute for an actual class. Using this site requires discipline from the students. There is a lot of benefit that can be gained from using Khan Academy if it used hand in hand with classroom learning.
Physics will never be considered as an easy subject, but our modern way of living has provided our students with vast resources at their fingertips. It is now up to them to use it to their advantage.
General Chemistry
General Chemistry students are beginning to realize how “helpful” the periodic table really is as they use it to predict and understand the electron placement around atoms. They have also been using virtual labs to understand the relationships between electrons, energy and the electromagnetic spectrum. This understanding will enable them to move onto the next topic of explaining periodic trends.
General Physics
The General Physics class is on the final stages of investigating forces and Newton’s Laws of Motion. They started off with the basics of defining a force and have progressed to calculating forces on an incline as they take into account reaction forces as well. This truly tests their critical thinking skills as they use many past equations and concepts to arrive at their answers.
AP Chemistry
AP Chemistry is working at a college level pace and learn the many difficult and complex concepts associated with Advanced Placement Chemistry. In the lecture part of the class they have just finished learning about the electronic structure of atoms while in the lab portion of the class they are applying chemistry to the real world as they investigate the chemistry of water hardness and design a lab to test the calcium concentration of two unknown samples of water.
