Author: Roland Roberts

Missouri is my home state.  I grew up in what was then a rural area south of St. Louis, in Arnold.  Seeing the stars at night was no big deal, and something I took for granted. Arnold can longer be considered rural and in the intervening 40 years has gone through the typical suburban sprawl …

Light Pollution in MissouriRead More

Okay, here is a resource for your next career day.  The American Physical Society has put together a slideshow you can download.  I need to browse this so I can work on my spiel for career day at my son’s middle school, IS 30.

The January 2010 issue of Physics Today’s web watch section mentioned the Sun|trek web site which contains a number of resource for learning about the Sun and it’s effect on the Earth.  The material is varied and the comment about being "devoted to teaching schoolchildren" is a bit vague on the age group, but the format includes a large number of images and other materials that make it engaging, certainly for middle school and possibly for older elementary students (depending on the lesson).  Of course, some of the material is clearly target

Tonight I attended a community meeting where the main topic of new business was a presentation by Thomas Greene, formerly a teacher at Fort Hamilton High School here in Bay Ridge and now an adjunct professor at Kingsborough Community College, part of the CUNY system. The sad part of the proposal is that is is …

Bay Ridge Regional Science Lab ProposalRead More

Mars opposition party open to the public on the south end of the Great Lawn in Central Park.

The American Physical Society has a nice web site called "Physics Central" which has, among other things, a section called Physics@Home.  For those of you who put off you science fair projects until the last minute, have a look at some of the things you can try at home.  The laser and jello experiment looks …

Physics at Home, Science ProjectsRead More

This exercise is a repeat of the previous one, but this time we are going to do the problem using a spreadsheet program.  Many people use spreadsheets as simple tables, formatting textual information neatly so it looks good for display. While you can certainly use a spreadsheet for that purpose, its overkill.  Your word processor …

WeatherBug Exercise 1 (Computer): Temperature Statistics: Max, Min, Range, Median, MeanRead More

This has been one of my pet peeves for a while, and my kids can already point out the things I’m going to whine about as we drive along the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) coming home from Queens.  There are several of these video billboards along the road.  I have always found it ironic that there …

Light Pollution from Digital/Video BillboardsRead More

I first saw the reference to the Elements of Humanity web site in Physics Today although I subscribe to MAKE Magazine who made the site.  Elements of Humanity is a set of interviews with 12 scientist and engineers who talk about what inspired them to choose their careers.  Some of them are fascinating for teachers, …

Elements of HumanityRead More

Okay, that’s a mouthful.  I first read about this a month ago and put it on my list of things to look into.  What I was hoping for was something that might be applicable for participation by middle school students.  NALTA is a cosmic-ray detection experiment which requires fairly simple equipment which is placed on …

NALTA: North America Large-area Time-coincidence ArraysRead More