Monday, July 11, 2016
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This week has been mostly spent in preparation for the OSA workshop at the summer meeting next weekend. I have been working feverishly to finish up all of the lesson plans we will be sharing at the workshop, and I am happy to report that almost all of them are final or very nearly so. This is a very good thing, because we will need to print out many copies of each lesson plan before leaving, so we need to have everything ready by Tuesday. This past week we managed to pack up a lot of the equipment we will need for the conference and get it shipped out, but there’s still some stuff we will need to bring directly with us.
Near the end of the week, as the lesson plans began to be wrapped up, I started turning my eye to what I would be doing for the rest of the summer once this workshop is over. Admittedly there will only be about 2.5 more weeks of work once the conference is all done, but I want to make as much use of them as possible. I have been tasked with helping to provide discussion questions to the participants in the Bootstrap for Physics program that we have been developing, so I will need to do some more research on Computer Science education in high school. On Friday, I was able to get a look at the discussion forum we are using for the participants and I will hopefully be contributing some questions to that forum in the near future!
There isn’t too much more to report about work this week, since I’ve been working on the same project for awhile. Next week will be very exciting, and in my next blog post I will hopefully be able to write a little bit about how the OSA workshop went in Sacramento! I am excited (and perhaps a little nervous) to be working with excellent physics educators and sharing my lesson plans, so I’ll report on that next week. Hopefully I will have some pictures too!
I am happy with the knowledge that a lot of hard work is about to pay off. I am very much looking forward to the coming week and showing off some of my work at the Summer Meeting, and I will share all of that with my loyal readers in the next couple of posts.
Simon Wright