Sarah Robles punctuates the opening of every Science of the Summer Olympics video—with good reason. She’s a “super heavyweight” lifter. Sarah’s strong for sure, but her abilities rely as much on finesse as on strength. See how her technique ties into robotics in this installment of Science of the Summer Olympics—Sarah Robles and the Mechanics of Weight Lifting.

Asking teachers what they think of when they think “engineering,” we found that most often it’s robotics. Very few mention biology topics outside of genetics. This video will give students insight into the field of biomimetics, or using nature to help design and engineer a variety of devices. Not only will your future mechanical engineers see how science is put to work, your future bioengineers will too.

If you are just tuning into this blog after an all-too-short summer break, scroll down to find others in NBC Learn’s Science of the Summer Olympics video series that focus on the link between science knowledge and engineering design with input from NSF engineers. NSTA-developed lesson plans help you put the videos to work in the classroom. The series is available here, and cost-free on www.NBCLearn.com and www.NSF.gov.

We hope you will try them out. If you do, please leave comments below each posting about how well the information worked in real-world classrooms. And if you had to make significant changes to a lesson, we’d love to see what you did differently, as well as why you made the changes. Leave a comment, and we’ll get in touch with you with submission information.

–Judy Elgin Jensen

Image of weightlifter courtesy of Keith Williamson.

Video
In “Sarah Robles and the Mechanics of Weightlifting,” Brian Zenowich, a robotics engineer at Barrett Technology, Inc., explains how he and others working in the field of biomimetics use nature to help design and engineer a variety of devices, including some of those used in medicine. Zenowich discusses and demonstrates his company’s Whole Arm Manipulator, or WAM™ Arm, and compares it to how Olympian weightlifter Sarah Robles’ arms work.

Lesson plans
Two versions of the lesson plans help students build background and develop questions they can explore regarding mass, force, and robotic arms. Both include strategies to support students in their own quest for answers and strategies for a more focused approach that helps all students participate in hands-on inquiry.

SOTSO: Sarah Robles and the Mechanics of Weightlifting models how students might investigate the relationship of mass and force.

SOTSO: Sarah Robles and the Mechanics of Weightlifting, An Engineering Perspective models how students might design simple models to mimic robotic arms.

You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans:

[contact-form 2 “ChemNow]

If you focus science explorations in your classroom on a yearly theme, consider water play/study. Carol M. Gross of Lehman College describes the many, many aspects to water play/study and connections to social learning, art, physical development, and social studies in her article “Science Concepts Young Children Learn Through Water Play” in the Dimensions of Early Childhood, vol 40 no. 2, 2012, the journal of the Southern Early Childhood Association.  (SECA is a regional organization that advocates for quality care and education for young children and professional development for early childhood educators.)
Dr. Gross draws from a large number of resources to fully describe the spectrum of activities with water. Her tables are so useful! She lists concepts, the explorations that can occur and describes meaningful conversation questions so we can really see the science in water play.
For example, while engaged at a water table or while cleaning tables, children can explore porosity, defined as permeability to fluids, exploring with sponges, cotton, cloths for everyday cleaning, or for exploration in a low container of water, and teachers can support the exploration by asking, What happened when you squeezed it? What did you find out about this material? Which material held the most water?
Water play/study is part of learning about topics such as, properties of materials, needs of living organisms, understanding motion, measurement, and making mixtures.
Thanks to Dr. Carol Gross and SECA  for supporting early childhood teachers in teaching science! Comment below to share how you use water play to teach science concepts in your program.
Peggy

We already knew Michael Phelps was good. Now Missy Franklin is a household name. But how much of their achievement might be attributed to the pool? Find out about the design and engineering of the London Aquatics Center in this installment of Science of the Summer Olympics—Designing a Fast Pool. Who knew how much engineering goes into a huge hole filled with water and marked off into lanes!

Join NBC Learn, NSF, and NSTA as they explore the engineering of sport (and science too!) through the lens of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Use the video to engage students, spark discussion, and liven up your own lesson plans. Use the NSTA-developed lesson plans to promote inquiry through the application of science and engineering design concepts. These lesson plans provide a good opportunity, in the words of one of our contributors, to allow students to “mess around” with materials as they develop and refine their own questions for investigation. Allowing students to “mess around” with equipment, even simple materials, conjures up scenes of chaos in many. But those who build in a little extra time for students to examine the available materials and fiddle around with them find that it actually conjures up more thoughtful explorations!

Add these STEM resources, available cost-free on www.NBCLearn.com and www.NSF.gov, to your arsenal as you prepare to head back to the classroom. And be sure to let us know how you like them!

Hmmmmm … wonder how many more medals Mark Spitz might have hung ‘round his neck if he had swum in such a “fast” pool!

–Judy Elgin Jensen

Aerial image of London Aquatic Center courtesy of Context Travel.

Pool image courtesy of Claire Dancer.

Video
In “Designing a Fast Pool,” Anette Hosoi, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains how the knowledge of waves and the energy they transfer is applied to designing competitive pools, such as those built at the London Aquatics Center for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Lesson plans
Two versions of the lesson plans help students build background and develop questions they can explore regarding pool design and other factors that impact the swimmer. Both include strategies to support students in their own quest for answers and strategies for a more focused approach that helps all students participate in hands-on inquiry.

Designing a Fast Pool models how students might investigate factors associated with the mass of the swimmers.

Designing a Fast Pool, An Engineering Perspective models how students might apply what they learn in the video or other sources to explore how pool design and turbulence are related.

You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans:

[contact-form 2 “ChemNow]

Are you thinking of supplementing traditional textbooks with digital media? If you’re looking for websites and other resources for your curriculum topics, take a look at SciLinks, NSTA’s collection of vetted websites. Access to the site is free, and a free registration will give you access to even more features.
You can find websites in the database either by using the codes in your SciLinked textbook (look for the logo) or NSTA publication or by searching for a keyword and grade level on the site.
As a teacher, you can provide logins for students to search for sites, give them a list of suggestions, or include the links in another online document such as Moodle, a social media site, a class blog, or your website. With the “Favorite Websites” feature of SciLinks, you can create your own subset of websites to share with students. For interested or advanced students, you might go up to the next grade level or you could go down a level for students who may struggle with the text.  Share a login with the librarian so that he/she can remind students of this resource. If your students use the technology at a local public library, perhaps the staff there could be alerted as to how and why students would access this.
One thing I’ve enjoyed over the years is using the SciLinks websites to keep current on topics such as human genome research, earthquakes, or climate change. If you’re unfamiliar with a topic, searching for sites geared to middle or high school students would be a quick and painless way to learn more about it.

With the College Board’s increased emphasis on student inquiry as part of the AP Biology curriculum revision, I am struggling with whether to require my students to keep a written and bound laboratory notebook, as is the practice in industry. The biology department chairman at our local university says that such practice is up to individual professors. Is the lab notebook going the way of the dinosaurs as laptops and notepads are becoming more common?
—Dan, Missouri
We hear a lot in journals and at conferences about science notebooks, but the role of technology is a consideration. I forwarded your question to two science professionals for additional insights.
Rose Clark, PhD, is the department chair and a professor of chemistry at Saint Francis University, in Loretto, Pennsylvania. She also works with classroom teachers as part of a math-science collaborative.

In academics the laboratory notebook is still crucial. Documentation of research/experimental data is very necessary, and written analysis is still a major form of documentation. I do not know of any colleagues in chemistry research that have gone to tablet [computers]. We do have a lot of electronic data on the other hand that has to be saved and stored as part of the documentation of our work. I am sure there is a mix in industry as well. 

In general, as an educator, I think it is critical that the students learn the process of keeping a good laboratory notebook on paper. Taking the time to write in the notebook allows the students time to organize their thoughts.  They also take the time to create tables and organize data since they will not be able to reorganize easily. I would hate to see students not trained to use a paper notebook. Once they get a job they will easily learn software to keep notebooks if needed but learning the process of keeping a good notebook is harder to teach.

Nicole Henderson is a biologist and an associate staff scientist at the Hershey Company.

This is an interesting and timely question. As we stand today, we [those working in research and development] are still using traditional lab notebooks for project work. There is a push currently to move to electronic lab notebooks as part of a “knowledge management” process. [The team is] looking at several systems, but it wouldn’t just be keeping the same information in emails or word docs—it has to be part of a bigger, searchable system. 

Many of us currently in science research and education grew up with hard copy notebooks. But it’s hard to predict what tools our students will be using in their future endeavors, and we want them to be able to adapt to new tools as they are developed. As Dr. Clark notes, having a strong foundation in organizing and analyzing data seems more important for students than mastering a current technology that will itself be soon outdated.
You might also consider how students will access electronic-only lab documents during the year, both in and outside of class. Will they have to log into a school network or document-sharing program to retrieve them? Will they maintain their own copies digitally? How will students access their notebooks in the future (for example, referring to their work after they go on to college)?
Electronic tools do have advantages in terms of communications.  Files can be archived, updated, and shared for input and comments. (I know teachers who are using LiveBinders http://www.livebinders.com/ for students to create electronic portfolios.) As a teacher, I would welcome a way to avoid carrying dozens of student notebooks around to review. I also can’t imagine writing a report in longhand or organizing data without a spreadsheet.
I visited a biology class recently in which the teacher used a hybrid approach. The students were investigating the relationship between salt concentrations in water and the growth of plants. Students on each team recorded their own data in their notebooks. The teacher then guided the students through designing a spreadsheet in Google Docs in which all of the teams could combine their data. The spreadsheet was displayed on the white board as each data set was entered. Right away, students began noticing patterns and anomalies. The class discussion was intense as they tried to explain them.
Whatever hardware and software students use today will probably be extinct “dinosaurs” within a few years. For example, in the 1990s (not that long ago), my dissertation was prepared with software that no longer exists and stored on a 3.5″ floppy disk. I was able to translate the documents into a version compatible with my current technology, but most of the formatting was lost. Fortunately, I still have the hard copy. I also still have my yellowed and dog-eared high school and college science notebooks.
Rather than thinking of traditional notebooks as “dinosaurs,” perhaps we should think of them as “horseshoe crabs”—predating and surviving the dinosaurs, and having a role to play even as other tools become available and relevant.
 
Photo source: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3072/3110638201_0b7e66a19a.jpg