The Science Of Star Wars: Creative Physics Learning In A Galaxy That Isn’t Far Far Away

Physicist and Star Wars fan Professor Carsten P Welsch explains how Star Wars fiction can help students to better understand the developments happening in accelerator science.

“Much to learn, you still have” are the famous words of Jedi master Yoda to Count Dooku when he faces his old Padawan in Attack of the Clones.

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      string(5679) "being balanced or unbalanced. This model will be further developed at KS4. Although the treatment of Newton’s Laws is best left until then, it is important to avoid misconceptions being inadvertently set up: forces being balanced doesn’t necessarily mean that the object they are acting on is at rest, but rather it isn’t accelerating.There is a pitfall for the unwary in using contexts in which there are a number of forces acting which are not at right angles or parallel to each other (e.g. a child sliding down a slide). If pupils are required to work out the resultant it will be beyond their mathematical capabilities.An important categorisation in the study of forces is the distinction between contact forces and non-contact forces. Pupils will have studied both magnetism and gravity at KS2 but at KS3 there is the start of the concept of a field, which is applied to both of these (and electrostatics are introduced as well). Developing this idea is important, including the notion that the field is stronger at some places than others, such as near the poles of a magnet (the attraction or repulsion can be felt to be stronger) or near a large mass (objects losing weight the further they travel into space from the Earth).Gravity can be effectively explored both on the scale of the personal (thinking about weight and how that would alter if near to a planet with a different mass) and in terms of solar systems and planets orbiting a sun (for example, keeping the Moon in orbit around the Earth and the Earth around the Sun). Pupils may imagine the Earth’s gravitational field reaches no further than the edge of the atmosphere.Their previous study of space will have related largely to the Solar System and the development of explanations around the causes of day and year length. This can be extended by using the same model to explain seasonal variation. It now needs to extend much further and set our solar system in the context of many such systems and the understanding of what is meant by a galaxy. Coupled with the use of the light year as a measure of astronomical distance, this is leading towards a gradually developing sense of the scale of the universe.KS3: EnergyObjectives: Knows the main fuels and energy resources of the Earth Can recognise how energy is stored and is transferred in terms of force Understands how energy can be transferred in the form of heat, and the principle of temperature equilibrium Understands how energy is measured and that it has the same value before and after changes Understands how fuel bills are calculated Energy has no formal role in the teaching of Science in KS 1 or 2. However it is unlikely that teachers will have been able to explore activities such as running toy cars down ramps or identifying food chains without either they or pupils at some point using the term. This is understandable: pupils will use the word in everyday parlance. It does mean, however, that existing ideas need to be explored and misconceptions identified. The study of energy needs pupils to speak, listen and write to construct explanations as well as see demonstrations and carry out experiments.Energy is one of the most fundamental ideas in science and is used in explanations of a wide range of phenomena, from why birds of prey hunt, through why chemical reactions take place to how we keep warm in the winter, yet it is a tricky concept. Many teachers will have encountered it in their education using the ‘transformation model’: in a torch chemical energy in the battery is converted into electrical energy in the wires and then into heat and light in the bulb. This helps to describe how a torch works, or at least why it won’t continue to work indefinitely. However, it’s not so good at suggesting where the energy has gone if, for example, the torch is then switched off or allowed to run down. Pupils may suggest that there’s less (or no) energy left in the battery, none in the wires, no heat and no light and conclude therefore that the energy ‘has gone’. The approach now used in the Programme of Study uses the model of ‘stores and transfers’. The energy that was stored in the battery is transferred by electricity, heat and light to the environment, where it has been dissipated. Pupils shouldn’t be too concerned about tracking how the energy has been transferred, but can usefully compare the total input at the start with the total output at the end. Pupils should understand that if adjacent places are at a different temperature then energy will tend to be transferred until they even out. A parcel of fish and chips will lose heat until it is at the surrounding temperature and a block of ice cream will gain heat until the same thing happens. We can intervene in this by using insulation, which postpones the inevitable, or using devices such as cookers or refrigerators, which draw upon further energy supplies to maintain the differential.Fuels are a useful context to study energy with. Thinking about a moving car or a house being kept warm in the winter, these processes can be made sense of by thinking about the energy store at the start of the process being a tank of petrol or a supply of gas. They also provide a context for considering the finite nature of the earth’s resources and the challenge we face in using these well so that ‘the lights don’t go out’.Studying fuels also supports the idea of fuel bills and how these are calculated. Exploring this reinforces a number of key ideas, such as the cost of maintaining a supply system irrespective of usage (hence"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Paving the Way for Physics Progress

8 Jul 2019

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      string(5722) "From dance crazes like the ‘Floss’ to films, songs and toys, there are a wide range of cultural experiences and interests students have that often seem disconnected from their classroom learning. As highlighted in this issue in ‘Why Pop Culture Needs to be a Part of STEM Education’ (p. 62), simple tweaks to subject content can make a significant difference in how students relate to a subject and get them emotionally invested in pushing forward to develop new skills. Although it can be overwhelming to think about where to start with pop references in the classroom and to come up with ideas that offer both enjoyment and depth of coverage, there are many resources available. In the following section, we’ve highlighted just a few of the available websites that are finding creative and innovative approaches to teaching subject material using popular culture. Many of these include lesson plans or videos that can be used in class, but others have online platforms that allow students to create videos or magazines, or engage directly with the material through quizzes or online assessment. It is clear that many teachers are finding in popular culture a way of keeping their own teaching fresh and ensuring students have a range of experiences in the classroom and we’re pleased to be able to share some of these ideas and approaches with you.Making Curriculum Pophttp://mcpopmb.ning.com/Making Curriculum Pop describes itself as “a resource sharing community for educators interested in better practices and teaching with pop culture”. It is a sharing hub with more than 7,000 members and groups that cover a wide range of interests and teaching ranges. The owner of the page, Ryan Goble, states that the site was set up because “it is hard for individual teachers to catch every cool website, video clip, song, study guide or comic but collectively MC POP is a forum where we can all share resources to reinvent our core curriculum and the larger dialogue on public education. So if you use popular and common cultures to reflect, refract, refocus and reinvent your core curriculum MC POP is the place for you.” Users can set up their own page and from there can connect to other teachers and any of the 87 listed groups. Group categories include subjects or levels as well as special interest topics like ‘Identity: Gender, Race, Sex, SES and Power’, ‘Graphic Novels and Comics’, ‘Adolescent Films’, ‘Making Music Pop’, etc. Members post all sorts of resources, including lesson plans, videos and articles, along with discussion threads and suggestions for primary sources. There is a ‘Week in Review’ section where top articles, links and threads are compiled, highlighting the main interests of the week. Members can post links to articles, videos and other web content and they can contribute to discussion threads and curate their own ‘playlists’ or write messages/content that would be of use for other teachers. For teachers interested in further pursuing the pop culture angle, the owners of the site have also published a book engaging with related teaching theory called Making Curriculum Pop: Developing Literacies that was published in 2015 by Free Spirit Pub.NuSkool – Real Life Learningwww.nuskool.comNuSkool is an entertainment learning platform that finds teachable moments in popular culture. Their aim is to help the audience find the hidden lessons in all aspects of entertainment. They see their job as showing the world that learning isn’t confined to a textbook and occurs both inside and outside the classroom, which is what they consider ‘real life learning’.NuSkool has a team of highly qualified educators, researchers and pop culture experts who produce videos, articles, standards aligned lesson plans, quizzes and other types of assessments. The lessons themselves can be accessed for free off the home page and include titles such as ‘X-Men: Are Mutants Already Among Us?’, which is a lesson on evolution and genetics, or ‘Will the Real Iron Man Please Stand Up?’, a Physics and English Language Arts lesson based on the public figures Elon Musk and Tony Stark. Other topics include Donald Trump, police brutality, Star Wars, prosthetic limbs, baseball, bullying, video games, and many others. The lessons include written aspects as well as videos and media content. Each one has a full lesson plan and assignment that the student can fill out on the website. The lessons and assignments are free, but the lesson plans are available via subscription. Subscription packages are affordable, ranging from $1.99 per day to $70 per year. Subscription access also includes access to assessments, quizzes and test prep exams, unlimited student accounts, the ability to create online classes and send lessons to students and the capacity to facilitate private group discussions with students on each post. This is an excellent resource for using pop culture in the classroom and is a great way to get new ideas for thinking about this approach to teaching. It’s OK to be Smart  https://www.youtube.com/itsokaytobesmartPBS Digital Studios has more than 50 original web series on offer that explore science, arts, culture and more. ‘It’s OK to be Smart’ is a YouTube channel that looks at science from unconventional perspectives, including through the lens of popular culture. 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Arts-Based Learning

Popular Culture Online

10 Oct 2018

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      string(440) "The power of games to focus young minds is undeniable. What is less well established is the power of games to inspire learning across a range of subjects. But, with so many opportunities for young people to get involved in designing their own games, the time has never been better to start to integrate games into your teaching. Here, Tim Hunter, Director of Learning & New Talent at BAFTA, discusses game design."
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      string(5770) "Like many of my generation, the soundtrack of my childhood holidays was comprised of the shrill static shriek of the ZX Spectrum loading games from an old cassette player, punctuated only by my mother imploring me to turn off the computer and go outside for some fresh air. Games back then were a new and scary world, and quickly the idea of the lone player, passively plugging into a game and blocking out the rest of the world, took hold.Whether that was ever really an accurate picture is debatable, but it certainly isn’t any more. With new consoles such as the Wii, dance mats and smartphones, games have become far easier to pick up and also far more social, attracting more and more young women. Whilst learning to code was a key attraction of my beloved Spectrum and other consoles at the time, that invitation to get creatively involved with games waned in subsequent years. Now it is back with a vengeance. Take the BAFTA-winning game LittleBigPlanet for example, where players are encouraged, whether playing alone or in groups, to create new content using the in-game creation tools and then share their creations with other players online.All of this is about opening up the world of game creation to those who play them. Rather than passively consuming others’ games, it’s about young people harnessing the power of games to tell their stories, socialise with their friends and, I believe, to understand the world better.The skills required for game design are applicable to a number of subjects, including maths, English, science and ICT. Calculating the trajectory of a pig being catapulted through the sky requires an understanding of maths; for a game to tell a story you need creative writing; while to make an Italian plumber ‘jump’ over a mushroom involves understanding physics.BAFTA launched the Young Game Designers (YGD) competition over five years ago to equip young people with the knowledge, skills and confidence to become the next generation of successful game designers. The initiative aims to demystify the creative process of game development and highlight how key qualifications in areas such as maths, physics and computer science, as well as English and art, are essential for those wishing to enter the industry.Over the years that the BAFTA YGD competition has been running, we’ve had some fantastic entries and seen some incredibly creative and original game designs – with some early winners going on to have extremely promising starts in the industry, including one of our first winners, who earned a BAFTA nomination at our British Academy Games Awards just a few short years later. For me, two of our stand-out YGD entries from last year were 15-year-old Jack Mills from Liverpool, who won our Game Making Award for his game ‘Utopia of Rhythm’ and 14-year-old Camylle Tuliao from Essex, who received a Game Concept Award for her creation ‘Dreams’.Jack’s entry was a platformer game that incorporated elements from the rhythm game genre. Players had to avoid a series of traps and obstacles which not only changed every level but also changed with the tempo of the music.Camylle’s game design was a first-person role-playing adventure set in four different locations, Imaginati, Reve, Nightmare and Limbo. Players could play as either Christelle or Christopher, and the way to win was different in each world, with players able to pick between three fighting styles, Imagi (magic), Logio (science) and Void (dream- manipulating). The jury described the game as “an evocative concept that intertwined unique themes to create a psychological thriller.”Both entries combined creativity and design skill in different ways, showcasing knowledge built across a number of school subjects.Last year’s awards also saw Ray Chambers, Head of IT at Uppingham Community College receive our first YGD Mentor Award, for his creative approach to using games in the classroom.At BAFTA we are huge advocates for the positive power of games, and in particular game design. Young people can enter Young Game Designers in teams and, over the years of the competition we’ve seen brilliant entries from teams who have learned to work together and maximise their various skills to put a game together.An excellent activity for introducing young people to game design is to challenge them to take a game that exists already, which they enjoy playing, and get them to design additional levels and puzzles that they think would fit within it; a practice which they could later find themselves doing as a game designer working within a studio.Game design can incorporate knowledge from pretty much every school subject; Arthur Parsons, Game Director at BAFTA-winning games studio TT Games recently cited geography as one of his main design inspirations, encouraging young people to “read up on geography” and describing it as “the one subject that has served me so well in my time as a [game] designer.” Even thinking about the structure of a game and creating a storyboard will improve art and design skills as well as logical thinking, and exercise a child’s creative streak.When difficult concepts are taught to young people at school, many can feel intimidated– game design can help to keep them engaged. Game design encourages children to think quickly, gather information and use that information to solve problems and inspire creativity – skills that will benefit them for life. The BAFTA Young Game Designers competition is all about getting children interested in game design and a number of our previous entries have entered as"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

How children can get creative with game design

8 Jan 2018

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      string(5694) "A bit of backgroundThirty five years of working with young people in settings including mainstream, special and psychiatric and working for eight years as a Virtual Head teacher for children in care, have convinced me that the biggest difference we could make for children and adults is to support all settings to be ‘Attachment Aware’ – a term which has already got many practitioner champions. The ARC website – https://the-arc.org.uk – has a film which aims to capture what this looks like in practice. We use a working definition that an Attachment Aware setting is a place in which everyone feels safe enough to learn – including those who have experienced trauma, neglect and abuse. The concept of attachment is simple and profound. For schools and other settings to take on the challenge, we must provide a rationale, an action research driven evidence base and support. That is the purpose of ‘The-ARC’, which any setting interested in becoming Attachment Aware can join from 1st June.‘It’s not rocket science’The way our attachment needs are responded to and the way we respond to the needs of others define us and our understanding of the world. It’s not rocket science. We could fly to the edges of our galaxy and view the 100 billion [approx.] stars that form it and not find anything more amazing than the way in which the 100 billion brain cells we are born with interconnect to enable us to comprehend those same stars. The voyage out would be incredible and challenging, as is the voyage in to understanding our own minds. Part of the challenge of this journey is that we can’t undertake it in isolation. Connection made us. At the point of disconnection from the safety of the womb, a baby’s cry needs to trigger a connection with a safe adult or it will die. The film that features the astronaut undertaking a perilous spacewalk, securely attached to the mother ship and the terrifying moment when the cord is cut, holds our attention, because it connects to our deepest fears: abandonment, a space in which no one can hear us scream. And of course, as the audience we all want to shout ‘pull the cord on the back up rocket!’ as the astronaut, frozen in terror, drifts further and further out into the darkness.The worst classroom experience for both a teacher and a child can feel like that. Yet it is highly unlikely that either will recognise each other’s experience as similar. The business of learning is relational. A mind can only connect with an idea by making connections between its brain cells and these connections are formed relationally. The teacher seeks out patterns that the child can connect with. They explore the outer edges of their mutual understanding together and it can be amazing when the connection works, or it can be cold, empty and impenetrably dark when it doesn’t. Even a rocket scientist will feel like this if he (and for this particular analogy it’s a he, which may be unkind to men) does not make a connection with Y11 on a Friday afternoon. And if he doesn’t make that connection something interesting will happen. All his rocket science will be abandoned for the more basic purpose of survival and, depending on the attachment responses he learnt as a child, he’ll either calm himself down and remember that he has a spare rocket pack on his back and pull the special escape cord, or he will go into fight, flight or freeze – core survival responses. That’s why on any given Friday you will see rocket scientists sprinting across our nation’s playing fields pursued by the demons unleashed by their unmet attachment needs, whilst elsewhere a teacher takes a deep breath, smiles and says, ‘this isn’t working is it? So let’s try it another way. Push all the desks back; we are going to form ourselves into a human model of a black hole.’ And will that work? If it does, it will not be because of the brilliance of the strategy, gleaned from ‘how to do science with sullen teenagers weekly’ but because of the relationship the teacher has formed with Y11: because they trust him, they go on the journey. Which is why of course, it didn’t work when, over thirty years ago, when I started teaching with a glorious run of highly interactive lessons, a sweet child, who had sat at the front rapt and mute throughout, spoke up and said ‘why can’t we do more copying from the board?’ And I, bad teacher that I was, had to stop myself going up like a rocket. She didn’t get the pattern and felt unsafe and I felt the same. A discussion about the merits of my pedagogy and her oppressed state didn’t help either. She didn’t get the pattern; she didn’t feel safe; she wasn’t going to go on the journey.As teachers we need to understand about attachment. And I wonder why so often this part of the universe we navigate is so unknown. Is it because it is a beautiful mystery and should not be spoiled, or is it because attachment theory says something so profound about our humanity that it may be seen as dangerous, likely to blow up? A recent publication about behaviour has as its system illustration in the executive summary a man who bears for me a strong resemblance to ‘Gru’ in ‘Despicable Me’. He stands on a podium wearing a jumper with a big star on it. Lines connect out from him to key words that illustrate what he will do as a leader. There’s no one else in the picture, neither Minions nor children. He looks both powerful and abandoned. 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Family

Understanding the Importance of Attachment in School

16 Oct 2017