Constructing Physical Science

Adam Johnston

looking up at the night sky

When the weather gets clear, it’s not only great for going out in the day, but also for going outside at night. There’s a lot of great science happening both during light and dark hours. In fact, observing dark skies is a scientific study all by itself! Sometimes we take it for granted, but the reas…

hot chocolate effect

We often imagine that good science is the kind of thing that studies the dynamics of distant stars and a cure for disease. Sure, it does work on these big problems. But it is just as focused on and important to our everyday experiences. Here's my prime example. This is me at home, stirring some hot …

walk on rock

I like to walk in rocky places. Fortunately, we have lots of this terrain here in our mountains overlooking Ogden and the surrounding area on the Wasatch Front. From here in my backyard mountains (as I like to think of them), I'm looking up at rock cliffs, or maybe across a canyon at a pile of rocks…

sky nuggets

A few days ago some late afternoon clouds rolled in, the winds picked up, and then stuff started falling out of the sky really violently. It was a big thunderstorm with hail. The first thing I noticed after the storm passed is how these little chunks of ice stayed on the ground, but they disappeared…

science at home: noticing and record keeping

Schooling in a collaborative environment with a collective vision is no small task in any time, and that’s probably ten times more apparent in the middle of the pandemic. The educational system we’re used to, in spite of owning its share of flaws, is a monumental invention and a well-designed piece …

Curriculum Design

I'm often working with teachers and students on designing curriculum for different classroom settings. Here's a few things we do that I'm keeping here as a reference: Starting with observations and phenomenaBubble observationsIce and liquid phenomenaThe "substitute challenge" As of 1/11/19, Utah is …

Newton’s 3rd Law

Whenever two objects collide or interact in any way, we might start to talk about "Newton's 3rd Law." I should say from the outset that I don't like starting with this label, because I think we have to assemble a bunch of experiences before we really have a feel for what we're talking about. At the …

forces, matter, and energy

The concepts of force, matter, and energy get mixed together and confounded. For example, it’s easy to say that forces, matter, and energy are all in the following photos. But these are all distinct from one another, even though they’re related. Where and how do you see forces, matter, and energy in…

science in the making

Collectively, our class recorded positions and times of a bowling ball. This sounds like a funny thing to say unless you were there to witness it. The bowling ball got rolled down a long hallway, and groups were able to synchronize their timing devices and associate a time with a given position of t…

bubble observations

This narrative describes our first task. Walking into a first day of a science class, one of the proclamations that we’re conditioned to hear is about the power of the “scientific method.” There are plenty of first chapters of textbooks that devote themselves to describing a bit about what science i…

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