Use something they love to help them learn!

     Hello everyone! I know it's been a while since I've posted anything but times have been busy. I'm still in the process of getting photo release forms together so that I can add pictures of the students to the blog, but hopefully they will be here soon. Today, I wanted to talk about something that has been said plenty often enough but I haven't seen done as often as I'd like. This is taking something that students already know or love and including it in your instructional strategy. This is a major part in the theory courses taught to secondary educators and I can certainly see why it is stressed so much.

     Working with my current demographic, I find motivation and interest to be vital to getting students to buy-in to the lesson or take an active part in it. This means finding ways to make the students interested in something as thrilling as data collection. Luckily, I like to think outside the box and color outside the lines and I came up with idea that I believe the students really enjoyed and one that earned me a "that a boy" from my fellow faculty members. This was simply flipping bottles!

     If you haven't noted this craze, chances are you aren't around students who have access to a bottle that they can flip because they will... constantly! Here is a video that currently has over 53 million views on Youtube of guys flipping bottles:

     This craze has swept the globe for reasons that I can't fully understand but I know a winning horse when I see one. So, I decided to have the students do something they loved doing anyway, flip bottles! Luckily, I could sneak in a little education under the radar. The trick was to have students generate a legitimate experiment all while having fun. We proposed the test or initial observation, generated a hypothesis, collected data, analyzed the data, looked for sources or error and improvement, and finally graphed and shared our results. It was a great way to introduce the scientific method and basic data collection.

     This link will take you to a copy of the activity if you'd like to see it or use it in your own classroom. This link will take you to the graph that I used in place of the one you just visited. I had hopes of taking this into an Excel lesson and having the students compile all of their data into a single graph, but time didn't allow. All in all, the students enjoyed the lesson and showed definite improvement on their assessments of this content. I will definitely be bring this or an activity very similar back into my classroom.