Introducing RT;DL Virtuals: A Pithy Matter and Electroscopia

In the throes of my panicked pandemic preparation for my Physics and AP Physics courses, I tried to preserve as much of the flavor of the in-person courses as I could. But with students online at home rather than in class with hands on apparatus, what to do? This was just one of the ongoing challenges of remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL).

I opted to record observations for students to watch as they worked through lab activities. Students worked together in lab group Zoom breakout rooms. There are obvious downsides, and there were no doubt creative and innovative ways to leverage benefits (?) of the Zoom medium. But I'm just not that clever. Keeping head above water was challenge enough.

The upside to this approach was that the lab activity instructions needed only moderate modification. And that matched my goal. So the eventual post-lab quizzes required very little adjustment (if any).

Here are two of the products of that redesign process, now polished for distribution in my Lessons of Phyz store at Teachers Pay Teachers. These are devoted to electrostatics. Details are in the product descriptions.

The activities are written much as they would be for in-class, hands-on experiences. But students access the videoclips of procedures to make their observations. And there are special Instructors' Only videoclips to be shone to student groups when they've reached the point in the activity that calls for those observations. I did my best to provide group-specific observations so that inappropriate inter-group collaborations (i.e., cheating) is minimized. 

I'm happy with how they turned out. They may not be as good as Pivot Interactives, but why would you judge me against such a high standard?

A Pithy Matter [Virtual Lab Experiment] at Teachers Pay Teachers

Electroscopia [Virtual Lab Experiment] at Teachers Pay Teachers

Each of these includes:

Student print-friendly Google Docs file

Answer Key (Google Docs)

Access to video observations (link embedded in student file)

Instructor access to special observations (link embedded in the answer key)