Isaac Newton: Public domain image.Do you consider yourself well-versed in scientific thought? Can you recite all three of Newton’s Laws of Motion? In Latin? Are you one of those people who can prove a direct link between Albert Einstein’s hairdo and the Chaos theory? Oh, yeah? Well, how about you try to figure out these problems smart guy:
1) You fall into a swiftly moving river and are in need of a floatation device. You see a life preserver bobbing three yards downstream of you and another one three yards behind you. Which preserver should you swim toward?
2) A bullet is fired into one end of a spiral tube. When it comes out of the other end (forgetting here about the effects of gravity) will the bullet follow a trajectory that
(a) is a straight line.
(b) begins as a slight curve in the same direction as the spiral tube before gradually straightening out.
(c) begins as a slight curve in the opposite direction of the tube before straightening out?
3) A plane flying into a headwind will have a lower speed, relative to the ground, than it would if it were flying through still air, while a plane traveling with the benefit of a brisk tailwind will have a comparatively greater ground speed. But what about a plane flying through a 90-degree crosswind, a breeze that is buffeting its body side-on? Will its ground speed be higher, lower, or no different than it would be in calm skies?
Okay, how do you think you did? Do you think you did better than a ninth-grader? Probably not if he or she attends the Academy of Science in Loudoun County, Virginia. These are exactly the kinds of questions that Faye Cascio’s physics class has to tackle there.
And not only can her ninth-grade students solve these kinds of problems in Newtonian mechanics with flying colors, but they can explain the reasoning behind their solutions. If you’re like me, you guessed on one or two of them, but in Ms. Cascio’s class no one gets away with such nonsense. She insists that her students understand what they’re explaining.
“It’s called dipsticking,” Cascio said. “It’s really important to make sure the kids are picking this information up, and so I ask, Is this clear to you? Do you really understand it? and I won’t go on until I get a positive, satisfying answer.”
Cascio’s students are expected to learn to think like scientists and start doing experiments from the get-go. And they are required to design the experiments themselves, and even wear cool, white lab coats while doing so.
This could be good news for the perceived state of science education in our country, which for various reasons has been rather dismal. American students have not fared well in international science and math competitions as of late.
But the trend seems to be swinging in the opposite direction, according to the American Institute of Physics. Special programs in math and science for “gifted and talented” students are increasing. This year the percentage of high school students enrolled in physics classes is at an all-time high, and bachelor’s degrees in the subject have increased more than 30 percent in the last seven years.
This is really good news for science education, and it will be interesting to see how things pan out in future competitions.
But in the meantime, how about those three physics problem? How well do you think you did? Post your answers as a comment, and we'll see how everyone does before I post the correct answers. By the way, I missed them all. I’m so ashamed.
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