Essential Question 4

What project could help me integrate my content with making?

This year I will be teaching a physical science course.  As I began reflecting on the lessons I would like to keep and the ones I would like to modify or ditch for next year, I decided that I really need to add a unit about magnets and electricity.  This is one area that students learn very little about in our schools and I would like to change that.

The best part of this is that it is very easy to find wonderful projects that allow students to tinker and explore. One maker project I could include for relatively low cost is building electromagnets. Electromagnets illustrate the connection between electricity and magnetism. In real life, electromagnets are the foundation of many common electrical devices, such as door bells, MRI machines, electric motors, loudspeakers, and headphones.

TeachEngineering.org has a fantastic lesson plan for investigating the properties of electromagnets by allowing each student to create their own small electromagnet.  The lesson plan is very thorough and is perfect for someone like me who has very little experience in this area.  

The Alaska Science Standards that are being addressed in this project are: 

• [11] SA1.1 The student demonstrates an understanding of the processes of science by asking questions, predicting, observing, describing, measuring, classifying, making generalizations, analyzing data, developing models, inferring, and communicating.
• [10] SB2.1 The student demonstrates an understanding of how energy can be transformed, transferred, and conserved by examining energy (i.e., nuclear, electromagnetic, chemical, mechanical, thermal) transfers, transformations, and efficiencies by comparing useful energy to total energy.
• [11] SB4.2 The student demonstrates an understanding of motions, forces, their characteristics, relationships, and effects by conducting an experiment to explore the relationship between magnetic forces and electric forces to show that they can be thought of as different aspects of a single electromagnetic force (e.g., generators and motors).

I'm looking forward to trying this one out this summer and even more so with my students.  They alway take it to the next level and amaze me! 

Resources:
Electromagnet. (2019, May 19). Retrieved June 9, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnet#Uses_of_electromagnets

University of Colorado. (2019, April 14). Creating an Electromagnet - Activity. Retrieved June 9, 2019, from https://www.teachengineering.org/activities/view/cub_mag_lesson2_activity1Electromagnet. (2019, May 19).