spectrometer_minutes_9-10

4:03 PT, 4:08 PT (2nd attempt)_

Steve, Nicholas, Bernhard, Elisabeth, Lisa

Scott arrives at 4:15.

Secretary: Nicholas

Travel and Materials Updates

Bernhard will need to be picked up at the airport on Monday.

Lani: All materials have arrived. Travel planning is cleared.

4:10 PT: Activity Timeline

Starters

Lisa's layout looks good.

Elisabeth estimates 10-15 minutes for a student to build a cardboard spectrograph from the kit. Alternately, could borrow some plastic spectrographs from IfA.

Grouping and Break

Elisabeth: currently, students are given a 15-20 minute break in the middle of class.

Scott: grouping is often more demanding on facilitators than students. Students could break while we are working on group issues.

Agreed that we will . . .

NM: lost the thread here. What did we agree upon?

Day 1 Investigation

Primary facilitators should record what students are working on which components, for selection of groups for Day 2.

What exactly will students be investigating on Day 1? Will each group be limited to a single component? Students will be investigating with unfamiliar equipment, and without a lot of time to clearly define questions from the starter activity. If we don't initially organize students by components, we can be prepared to suggest that isolate their investigation if necessary. Nicholas proposes to start with open investigation instead of grouping by component right away. We will return to this question.

Day 1 Post-Investigation

Homework question (written by Bernhard) will replace presentations.

When should we introduce it to the students? If too early, students might not investigate as freely. But it would help for them to see it early enough to realize that they should record their investigation. Compromise: we can let them freely investigate for a while, then give out the assignment.

Self-assessment questionnaire (to be filled out between Day 1 and Day 2): Steve will think of some questions before we evaluate whether this is useful.

Wednesday

Expect some free time in addition to regrouping and analyzing/modifying activity so far.

Day 2 Homework review

Groups should have one person from each element of the spectrometer. We should map this out on Wednesday

Design Challenges

How do these compare to one another, as written? Do they have similar levels of difficulty? We should be prepared with additional steps for groups who meet their design challenges early.

Alternately, what if groups find the challenges much more difficult than we intend?

Scott: if we have diagrams of the "answers" (high-resolution spectrograph, high-throughput spectrograph), we can save them to show to groups who may really need help.

Bernhard: on Wednesday we could assemble the optimal configuration of each spectrograph with the class materials, then disassemble but be ready to help direct students on Thursday

Scott: how do we have them resolve two lines without showing them a working spectrograph?

Steve, Lisa: we could show them an image from a high-resolution spectrograph. But acquiring these images might take some time.

Grouping on Day 2

Scott: be aware of social issues from Day 1 and leave some flexibility to manage group membership

With a big class, we hopefully won't need to be too heavy-handed in scattering Day 1 groups.

4:56 PT

Day 1 Materials

Need to collect: cereal boxes, knives/scissors, black tape, cereal boxes

Elisabeth: lab has scissors, tape, one box-cutter

Upcoming Telecon

Agenda: no timeline discussion!

Instead, we'll discuss materials and preparation checklist.