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2022
3 articles on this page- The Lab Goes Home: astro-lab@home and the COVID Pivot in Astronomy Education In spring 2020, the astro-lab at the University of Cologne shut down like everything else. The question was whether you could replicate a hands-on student lab using smartphones and household materials — and send it home. This is the story of how we tried, what we published in CAPjournal, and what happened when schools reopened.
- Why Universities Need Their Own YouTube In June 2022 I presented on educast.nrw at the Tag der Lehre at HfMT Köln. This is the longer argument behind that talk: why universities should not outsource their video infrastructure to commercial platforms, and what a better alternative looks like in practice.
- Teaching Stellar Evolution Without a Star: DIY Experiments and a Board Game Stellar evolution is now in the NRW physics curriculum, but there are almost no direct experiments you can do with it. Two responses: some DIY smartphone experiments for stellar formation, and a board game called “Staub und Sterne” (Dust and Stars) that lets students play through the stellar lifecycle. Both grew from the astro-lab project at the University of Cologne.
2021
2 articles on this page- They Told Me Not to Use Design Thinking. They Were Right. I treated a design workflow as though it were a complete research methodology. Grounded-theory techniques would have made my analysis of unexpected student responses more systematic. That is a postmortem of this thesis, not a universal verdict against design-based research.
- Mission to Mars: Teaching Air Pressure with a Smartphone and a Vacuum Pump You give students a vacuum pump, a bag of household materials, and a smartphone running phyphox. Their task: build a spaceship prototype that will survive the pressure difference between the crew compartment and space. A design-based inquiry experiment published in The Physics Teacher in 2022, and one of the more memorable experiments I have been part of running.
2020
3 articles on this page- Please Stop Saying the Sun Is on Fire In September 2020 I gave a teacher training talk on stellar formation and the misconceptions students bring into class. The misconception list was long enough to be its own document. Here it is, with commentary. Includes: the Sun as a heat-planet, gravity that only works when things move, metals that always existed, and the obligatory complaint about quantum leaps.
- What Happens When You Film Student Teachers: ViLLA and the Case for Video in Teacher Education ViLLA is an online portal of real classroom videos built for teacher education at the University of Cologne. The idea sounds straightforward. Getting there required filming actual lessons, building infrastructure, evaluating a quasi-experimental intervention, and later scaling the project. Some notes on how that went.
- Hello World — What Is This Blog? An introduction to this blog: scientific ideas too lazy to submit, informal public review invited, with substantive corrections tracked in article changelogs and research notes.