Facilitation and Scaffolding
Tools and Techniques for Engagement:
- Students will be participating in variety of activities, including labs, guided lessons, interactive websites, talking to experts, doing a gallery walk, researching nanotechnology, and jigsaw readings.
- Students will be using technology in a number of activities, including doing research, using interactive websites, and doing the Excel lab.
- We hope that students find the topics of nanotechnology and the future of cellphones relevant and exciting.
- Students are given choice in some of the activities and labs, and they are responsible for creating their own cell phone design.
- The teacher will assign roles to each member of the groups based on what role the teacher believes a student will best fill. Before the first group assignment, students will participate in a brief group roles workshop where they will group together by roles and go over the supplied list of responsibilities. The students should discuss how they will exhibit these responsibilities in their project groups.
- The students should consider and discuss the following questions with their group (proposed on the 2nd page of Bill Worley’s Team Roles PDF)
- How can we best assess that each member is contributing equally?
- In what ways can we make all members responsible for each others' actions and successes?
- What should we do with a team member who does not “play nice?”
- How can we best evaluate the effectiveness of your team?
- Options for implementing this are Post-It notes on the board, Linoit, Poll Everywhere, etc.
- The students will complete an activity log at the end of every day. In this activity log, students will have to reflect on the progress they’ve made, how they can apply their new learning to their project, and what they have contributed to the group. The activity log can be done digital through google drive or forms (or any other digital media the teacher prefers) everyday or by pencil and paper. Implementation of this is up to the teacher.
- Students will also reflect and debrief on their skills and group progress through a peer and self evaluation completed at two points in the unit (middle and end). If the teacher wants to use a digital platform to collect the information, he or she may use Teammates or Google Forms.
- Brainstorming and Know/Need to Know - Students may have trouble brainstorming ideas for future cell phones.
- Ask students questions, like… What are some things you would like cell phones to do? Are there any things on the video you saw cell phones do that they don’t currently do now? Do you know how cell phones do what they already do? Have you seen any trends in cell phone technology? (Think about the Evolution timeline you created.) What do you need to know to figure out what possible new cell phone technologies will be?
- Macro2Nano Activity - Students may not know what types of objects exist on the nano and atomic scale and where the scales start and end.
- Remind students to look at examples done in class. The teacher can also give hints, like atoms and molecules exist on the atomic scale, and things you can see under a microscope are generally on the microscale.
- The atomic scale goes up to 1 nm, the nanometer scale goes from 1 to 100 nm, the microscale goes from 100 nm to 1 cm, and the macroscale starts at 1 cm.
- Macro2Nano Activity - Students may not be familiar with how to convert between the scales using scientific notation.
- Since the focus of the activity is for students to understand what types of objects fit in each scale or “world,” students may use online conversion tools.
- Nets, SA, and V Intro - Students may not know where the calculations for surface area and volume are coming from.
- We will discuss the relationship between surface area and nets prior to the activity.
- SA/V Excel Activity - Students may not be familiar with how to use Excel, especially how to graph a function based on their data.
- The teacher will lead students through one example (the sphere) and there will be a just-in-time Excel tutorial available for students to access.
- Nano Jigsaw - Students may have difficulty reading some of the more technical articles.
- Students will be working in groups and can help each other, and students have more than one option for choice of article, so they may choose to read the easier one.
- Size-Dependent Properties Activity - Students may have difficulty moving from one station to another in a timely manner.
- Set a timer for 5 minutes for each station.
- Technology Investigation for Presentations - Students may not know how to make a presentation
- Tutorials are provided for a number of presentation platforms in the document Technology Investigation for Presentation.
- How Big Is It - Students may be very unfamiliar with some of these items and might have trouble figuring out the size of objects at the extreme ends of the scale. They will likely confuse some items, like the cesium atom vs water molecule, how far you can drive in an hour vs the height of Mount Everest, or the size of an amoeba vs bacteria/human hair/red blood cell.
- Students are likely to have varying levels of knowledge about some of these, such as the size of an amoeba, bacterium, atoms, viruses, or DNA. For these, students should be encouraged to seek out students who may have more knowledge - not just those who sound like they know what they’re talking about.
- Certain lengths can be reasoned through, such as how far you can walk in 20 minutes or drive in an hour. Encourage precise thinking and debate on these.
- Gradually, students will be given more tools to make their guesses more precise. Students should be curious enough to clear up their own misconceptions by checking on how big objects are.
- Macro2Nano - When looking at scientific notation, students may think that 10^-9 is bigger than 10^-6 because 9 is bigger than 6.
- We will utilize prior student knowledge of negative numbers to remedy this misconception. Since -6>-9, 10-6 > 10-9.
- Macro2Nano - Students may think the atomic scale is bigger than nanoscale, or that microscale is smaller than nanoscale.
- This will simply take familiarity and repetition. We will discuss the various scales repeatedly in the unit, which will help with this misconception.
- Nets Intro - Students may think that any sheet of paper cut in any way can be folded into a polyhedron.
- The main effort regarding nets will be taking a 3-dimensional shape and unfolding it into a net, so this misconception may not rear its head. However, it is a quickly remedied one if it does show up in some students with a simple question - “what shape do you get when you just fold a piece of uncut paper?”
- Nets Intro - Students will likely be confused that a shape could have a net with rounded edges (cones).
- This misconception is also quickly remedied with manipulatives. Once students hold a physical net of a cone and fold it, they will have a better understanding of this. It could spark a good discussion about similar shapes: students may think that cylinders and spheres have similar nets, but that is not the case.
- SA/V Excel Activity - Students may think that surface area doubles when the side lengths double. They may think that volume doubles when side length doubles. They may also think that surface area and volume increase at the same rate - although this misconception may be difficult to reveal.
- This activity should naturally clear up this misconception when students look at the numbers. If you sense that some are not convinced by the numbers, then this activity lends itself well to manipulatives. Legos or Playdoh could illustrate well how doubling the side length of a cube requires 8 times the cubes to fill out the volume.
- SA/V Excel Activity - Students may expect that when they graph 1nm, 10nm, 100nm, 1 micron, etc along an x-axis, that these will be spaced equally apart.
- Ask students how they would graph data if the x-values were 1nm, 2nm, 3nm, …, 9nm, 10nm. Then ask where 100nm goes.
- Nano Jigsaw - Students may think that phones enhanced by nanotechnology will be nano-sized, or at least really small. For example, camera sensors lose quality as they get smaller, so it may not be good to make it smaller.
- In doing research, students will discover that many applications of nanotechnology simply make materials lighter or cheaper or stronger, or make memory chips store more data, or change the properties of certain materials. It does not necessarily make them smaller. Ask students if nanotechnology always makes things smaller. Some of them will surely have found applications of research that does not make phones smaller.
- Ask students if they would like their phone to be smaller, or if many people would. If not many people would want it, then companies wouldn’t produce it.
- Nano Jigsaw - Students may think that nanotechnology can make phones do anything, like make them invisible or make them shrink to the size of a penny, but laws of physics will still need to apply. They will need to see what applications of nanotechnology are possible.
- It is good to encourage imagination at first. That shouldn’t be squelched. Students will be in charge of refining their ideas during the research and group work times.
- Size Dependent Properties - "Water-repellent-ness" is due to hydrophobic nanoparticles, not just the kind of fabric. They may also think that the fabric will repel everything, but it may not repel non-polar liquids.
- If possible, have non-polar liquids on hand to test out any claims that the fabric will repel everything.
- Does it pour out activity - Students may think the water stays in the smaller tube because it weighs less, or because the tube is made of different material (which isn’t true), or because it’s less water.
- This misconception can be broken by challenging students to test their beliefs. Invite students to try using a lightweight container (such as a small bottle cap) and see if the water stays in the cap when tilted.
Image from Vanderbilt Peabody College, 2014