Bobby Tarchinski

I gave a talk at the March 2018 meeting of the Michigan Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers (MIAAPT). The title of my talk was "Formative Assessment and Gameful Learning in a High School Classroom." The abstract is below.

Abstract: As secondary schools continue to adopt bring your own device (BYOD) or one to one technology policies, portable computing devices have become ubiquitous in schools. Such devices open new avenues for teachers to assess student’ learning and engage students with challenging content. I will discuss two applications currently being used in the Physics classroom at Chelsea High School. The first is “Go Formative” which is used to assess student’ progress during class. The second is the “Mind on Physics” app which serves students with questions to help promote understanding of Physics concepts. Students complete learning missions and earn medals representative of their mastery of the content. These questions help reinforce concepts discussed in class, challenge deeply rooted misconceptions and engage students in learning Physics. In this talk I will describe these two applications and present ideas for other applications of mobile technology.

Talk Slides

Bulletin of the APS

Certificate from MIAAPT

Newton's third law is notoriously difficult for students to understand. That the interaction forces between two objects are equal in magnitude seems to contradict all of our physical intuition. I wrote an engaging lesson to introduce students to interaction forces and Newton's third law. This incorporated slow motion video to show students definitive evidence of Newton's third law force pairs during the interaction between two objects.

You can check out my lesson plan for this lab as well as video evidence from the actual class below. This was done during my internship at Plymouth High School (Fall 2017). Video of my teaching is available upon request.

My lesson plan for this lab

See video taken during this lab

For the final project in my science methods course (Education 422), I wrote a week of lesson plans. These plans detail a week-long introduction to dynamics and Newton's Laws. These plans can be easily adapted to any level of physics course, from conceptual physics to AP Physics. I am planning to field test these lessons during my student teaching experience at Chelsea High School.

Week of lesson plans on Newton's Laws

Advanced laboratory classes were one of the favorite components of my physics undergraduate education. I have always enjoyed watching theoretical science concepts come to life in the laboratory and these courses provided the opportunity to put many of the skills I have learned into practice. Included are two of my lab reports. Entangled Photon States and Bell's Inequality details a test of the fundamental principles of Quantum Mechanics. Raman Spectroscopy and the Raman Effect describes identification of materials by their interactions with laser light.

Bell's Inequality

Raman Spectrocsopy

During the summer of 2017, I instructed the physics course at Horizons-Upward Bound (HUB). I was the sole instructor for two sections of physics for 11th graders. I wrote homework assignments, conducted lectures and discussions, supervised laboratory work and implemented a final project on the physics of model rockets. The focus of this course was to prepare the students for the rigors of the full-year physics course they would taking during the academic year. I focused this course on key concepts of physics. I particularly emphasized coordinate systems, force diagrams and conservation laws. Understanding these concepts will help students be successful in any future science work.

Course description

Syllabus

Homework assignments/quizzes

Lesson notes

Students working with data

Rocket launch video

Cosmology, the physics of the universe, has always been of great interest to me. Studying this subject was one of the reasons I decided to pursue a Physics degree. In one of my undergraduate Cosmology classes, I wrote this paper on the Press-Schechter mass function. This describes the formation of a galactic dark matter halo from a random distribution of particles. In this report, I derived the mass function using a simplified approach and compared the Press-Schechter mass function to modern cosmological models.

The project