Sugata Mitra: Child-Driven Education

I work at an elementary school, and what I have found is if you give the kids something to work towards, they will find a way to get there if you don't help them out, or just barely push them along. That video and talk really showed that kids have such an imagination, that if they want to get somewhere, they will find a way even if they have no idea how to work something, if they care about it enough they will work for it.
I think that is what I took away from this more than the fact that "teachers aren't needed", because I think teachers will always be needed, sure students can learn certain things by figuring it out themselves, but I feel as if not everything that is needed when you are an adult can be taught to yourself. What I took away from it more is that we 1) need a less structured classroom and education system and 2) that we have to give the students the power to want to learn. If we just tell them they have to learn a, b, and c, they won't want to and will have problems with it, but if you find something they want to achieve or learn about, they will be more likely to learn it their own way.
I work at a private school, so most of the kids have both parents. However, when their parents pick them up most are talking on the phone, in a rush, and/or ignore their kids. I sometimes think I spend more time with them than their parents do. You can tell that the kids just want their parents to notice them, and it breaks my heart when a pre kindergardener wants to show off her finger painting and the parents just rolls their eyes and talks on the phone, you can tell that the kid probably doesn't want to work to anything because she thinks she isn't good at that. So the granny cloud I think is the best part of that video, because it gives kids what they want, and that's attention and acknowledgment that what they are doing is cool, and will work.
I found it inspirational how Sugata Mitra just put computers in the slums, and how kids found a way to work them without knowing anything. That shows me that we need to be getting creativity from all kids, and keeping them creative. It also shows me that those children in not well off places have such a desire to learn, and it makes me want to hop on a plane and jet off to the slums and just start teaching them what they want to learn, because seeing their smiling faces and seeing themselves so proud of learning how to do something on the computer reminds me of why I want to be a teacher.

Newton's Laws of Motion

Kelsey Hill, Sarah Hansen, Ally Hakeem

Newton's Cradle:
1st law: The pendulum illustrates the 1st law because the ball will stay at rest until force acts upon it. There fore, the balls will not move or stop until gravity or an outside force makes them move, or stop. When we would start the balls moving, they would die down, but not stop hitting each other even if the movement was very faint, until we stepped in and stopped them.

2nd law: The pendulum illustrates the 2nd law by when a ball is extended out farther it has a greater force onto the other balls due to the longer distance it falls, than a ball that is barely extended which has a lesser force due to the small distance it falls. We were able to tell that when we extended a ball far out, the ball on the other end would extend as far out as we had pulled ours out, to start with. When we barely extended it, the ball on the other side would barely go out. The ball that was extended out a lot had a greater distance to fall, so it had more force, forcing the other ball to go up just as high, where as the the ball that was barely moved didn't really fall, so it didn't have much force, and there fore the ball on the other side went up a very small amount.

3rd law: The pendulum illustrates the 3rd law because pulling back 4 balls there is more mass than the 1 that is left still, however when the balls are let go, the same amount of force goes out as went in. We could tell that by when we pulled back 1 balls and left 1 sitting there and we released the 4 balls into the 1, 4 balls went out the other end. We tried this by pulling back all 1-4 balls, and each time the same thing happened. No matter how many balls we pulled back and left standing, the number we pulled back would go out the other end when released and hit.

Marbles:
1st law: A ball that is standing still will stay still until a force is exerted upon it to make it move. A ball or balls that move will continuously move until a force is exerted upon it to make it stop. When we place a marble on the table, it shouldn't roll until I push it. And once we push it to start rolling, it won't stop unless an outside force like a wall or floor, or one of us stops it.

2nd law: When 2 balls are rolled, one slowly and one quickly, the ball which moves quickly and has more force exerted on it has more acceleration than the ball that has less force and therefore moves slower. We put marbles on the table at the same time and I put more force on one of them, and less on the other one. What happened was that the one with lots of force rolled very quickly and the one with less force rolled very slowly, and didn't stay in a straight line like the one with lots of force exerted on it did.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjpRyGbGpe4

3rd law: When a bigger and smaller marble are hit upon each other they bounce off each other with the same force, even when they are different masses. We got 2 marbles, one that had more mass than the other, and we hit them together and the same time and we saw that they hit each other with the same force, even though they are different masses. We saw this because when they hit each other they both bounced off with the same speed, and they both bounced off, not just the smaller one off the larger one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHwzxZqDMs

Toy Car:
1st law: A car that is not on and not moving will stay still until a force is exerted upon it to move. A car that is on and moving with continuously move until a force is exerted upon it to make it stop. Since the toy car is battery powered, the car will not move unless pushed with force by one of us, or unless turned on. It will not stop then, unless it is stopped by a wall, the battery dies, or we turn it off.


3rd law: When a toy car is turned on and is held in place by rubber bands and a spring scale being held by a person, the forces being exerted are the same. We can tell that because it stays where it is. If the car had been exerting more force than it would have moved despite being held back, and if Aly or the person holding it had more force than the car would be moving backward because she would be pulling it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtdDNqyrOvM

Weight and Mass:
2nd law: The calculations prove that the acceleration due to gravity x the mass (which we measured on the scale) is equal to force in Newtons which was confirmed by a spring Newton scale.