Today my students finished the better part of Building the ETM. The more and more that I do and teach physics the more of a rush I get in chasing the elusive, finding it and guiding my students to find the nuances of physics which are all a part of the elusive so that they understand, get the correct answers and become masters. I want to bottle the elusive so that it can always work for me and them but the joy and pain of it all comes when finding what has been elusive there is always more to be found which ultimately colors and catalyzes this beautiful journey of doing wonderful physics. My passion for physics is complete, is vast, and I am unabashed in my approach to help students learn this great and wonderful science because I simply want them to be the best and smash scripted expectations so that process is rugged, is hard, is a grind, provokes deep and uncharted thought but in the end can and does lead to rich discovery.
I will describe in a later post how I model energy transfer and some of the invaluable cues I have used from the one great Kelly O’Shea and Michael Lerner (thanks guys!) that I have reworked to my own Weltanschauung. After the first day when the students decide on what they want to measure about this random spring I was stretching in front of them they organized their data in a chart, graphed it by hand, generated an equation for the relationship they found and provided the same data for a LinReg version. Between the handwritten graphs and LinReg the students took a percent error in the slopes just to compare and discuss it’s physical relevance. (Again, the modeling details are to come). 
Here is one of the BOSSLinReg graphs I saw: This graph was generated about Day 50 so we’ve produced a lot more interesting results on the ETM in the last 7 days which will be chronicled along with the process I implemented for the students to build the model brick by brick. I do love the fact that it’s not perfect; shows the imperfection of experimentation, indications of kids playing around, arguing etc. and this group argues a lot. Ez’Ra is the only girl in the group (unfortunately the only girl in this period!) so there’s all that stuff going on with the guys and I suppose it shows up a little in the data lol. I love this stuff and I will write more later, especially on the structure of the ETM.
darnellkelly 