This week in class gave us an opportunity to explore various Texas Instruments probes and calculators that are available for 2-week loans to teachers. Here's a video clip that details the various options in data collection. We explored the relationship between distance and time with a motion detector, measured the heart rate of an Olympian kayaker, mixed lemon juice and bleach for various pH levels, and evaluated who had cold hands (but a warm heart) with a temperature sensor.
Talking with a local physics teacher, he said they use the motion sensor and force meters, and have just got the portable set-ups that work directly with the calculators, so that directly mirrors what we used last night.
I would have liked a quick tutorial of the probes, so that we wouldn't have to each spend time trying to decipher the vagaries of each probe. It wasn't until the end of class that someone figured out that the heart rate monitor doesn't register anything meaningful for 3 minutes: there isn't any feedback that tells you it's "thinking".
We listed the design features to look for when evaluating a new technology tool, and that will be very useful list for making comparisons.
I was discouraged to find out that the article I reviewed for the second executive summary was not a "practitioner-based" article. My understanding was that practitioner-based meant that it was a technology used with students; since this was not explained earlier, it seems unfair to make that a requirement after the fact. Perhaps a bit more up-front housekeeping would have averted the misunderstanding.
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