Boats and Buoyancy

Ed Practicum Journal June 11

I love science and was absolutely floored by a presentation on buoyancy which my class was presented with today. Complex ideas such as density and surface area were simplified and made coherent for a very young audience. One of my biggest fears teaching students science is that I would not be able to teach students complex ideas that have been fully integrated into my own understanding of a topic and with out which I would not totally understand an idea such as buoyancy. However it appears that students are much more competent than I believed when the material is presented in a friendly fashion at a level appropriate for the students. Now the question is how was this done and why did it come off as so elegantly simple? Density was done beautifuly and in a way that challenged the students understanding of their world. Most students came in with the belief that all wood floats, however this is not true some wood will sink. This was done by having two wooden blocks, a dark more dense one and a light less dense one. The less dense block floated while the more dense one did not causing some confusion in many of the students. I think this was excellent as it casued student to ponder how their belief was wrong and what is the answer is, possibly putting them in quite an inquisitive state. The coordinator then was able to tell them why this happened and let the students feel the weight of the blocks, providing the students with both a verbal and a kinesthetic basic understanding of density. Challenging the beliefs of student in a way that can be physically proven and represented is potentially a great way to teach science. Their are so many assumptions that people have made and that will be broken by scientific principles, and have been in the past. The state of awe and inquisition that breaking an assumption could in theory be a great memorization tool and encourage students to question their own assumptions and put them on a great path to start the scientific method. It may be challenging to constantly find exceptions or other things that violate student assumptions, but as long as an experiment does violate an assumption I don't think that this technique of learning can be overused. I say that because the more times this is done the quicker students can look at what is in the experiment, what their beliefs are and how this experiment could violate them. So skepticism to a students own beliefs may emerge and create quite a base for an inquisitive and scientific learner. However this idea must be tested before I can truly state this as a fact and it may require a prolonged study on the subject but it is certainly an interesting hypothesis.