Keystone Weekly
volume 3, issue 29        April 29, 2002

This week's Key Points: *Kit Use: Variables (FOSS)* and *Web Pick of the Week*
Scroll for details.

Kit Use Through a KSN Teacher's Eyes: Variables (FOSS)

Eloise Laskowski is a fifth grade teacher at Upper Dauphin Area Middle School in the Capital Area Math/Science Alliance. Eloise shares her experiences in using the FOSS Variables kit.

In Variables, students identify and control variables and conduct controlled experiments using several multi-variable systems: pendulums, airplanes, boats, and catapults. They compare the outcomes of experiments, identify relations between variables, and make predictions.

Eloise was introduced to this kit at her Intermediate Unit and through a (now-defunct) partnership with a local college. She had chance to practice using this kit and she felt it fit well with her curriculum. It suits the arrangement of her science scheduling as well. She explains, "Our fifth grade is in the middle school. We now have fifty- two minute science classes daily with science labs.… It [the Variables kit] works very well here."

Eloise finds Variables "very easy to get ready" and calls the Teacher's Guide "absolutely essential." She enjoys teaching it, and is happy to find that it prompts her students to be "very enthusiastic learners."

There were a few tricky areas when it came to testing and data collection. Eloise and her students found that, in the airplane activity, "We would get our baseline data for the activity only to have it change the next day." Although this presented some problems for analysis, it did open up some further discussions of variables. Why did the baseline data change? Were there unexpected variables causing the results to alter over time? Eloise and her class guessed that perhaps the rubber band that was part of the propulsion was getting stretched out, and was therefore not the constant that they had thought it was.

The class also found some of the multi-variable tests to be difficult. In some activities, students had to simultaneously consider the "size of the balls used, the angle of flippers, and the length of the stick used to launch the ball," which Eloise found to be significantly "more complicated" for her students to assess.

Eloise reports that she absolutely wants to work with Variables again, and in the future, she'd make some changes. In working with the airplane activity, she'd prefer to have her students "build it one day, and test it the next day." She found that doing both on the same day was a bit too much. Eloise thinks that Variables would be great for other fifth grade classes, because "It's easy and fun to use, and there's high student interest."

[Back to Top]

Welcome to Global Science and Technology Week! The theme of this year's Global Science and Technology Week (GSTW) is "Science and Technology: Serving our Global Community."

The Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Executive Office of the President has joined with representatives from over 27 public and private organizations to develop activities for GSTW. To underscore this year's GSTW theme, activities and materials have been created by participating organizations to help parents, teachers, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians excite K-12 students about math and science. You can find these resources through the link above.

NASA, one of the supporters of this year's GSTW, also has educator/parent activities designed to "ignite student interest in math and science by drawing attention to the many ways their lives are enhanced by scientific and technological advances." The NASA resources are available here: http://education.nasa.gov/gstw2002/educator_parent.html

[Back to Top]

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9819641.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

webteam@keystone.fi.edu

© 2003. All rights reserved.