On August 30, 2020, volunteers from the Irvine branch of AYLUS hosted its very first science exploratory class for the fall session. We used Zoom to host the lesson, and students, consisting of elementary and middle schoolers, had a great time participating.
For our first lesson, the students all seemed familiar with the concept of f=ma. Aditya started off with an experiment that consisted of a small stress ball and a large soccer ball. He asked them which one would hit the ground first and many replied with the small one or both at the same time, signaling that many already knew about how force, mass, and acceleration are all intertwined. He carried on with the lesson and explained what mass, acceleration, and force where and the units that correspond with them.
After the slides on force and acceleration, Andy took over the teaching to explain Newton’s Laws of Motion, the concept of gravity, and normal force. The students understood these concepts really well, with almost no questions, and when those questions were answered they seemed to understand. Throughout this part of the lesson he kept a live diagram of the experiment on the bottom right corner of the screen, and each new topic he covered was added to the diagram to explain the experiment. When he was done with gravity, the kids understood why the balls fell at the same rate. Finally, after the normal force slide, he assigned them homework, which they will show to us at the beginning of the next lesson. The teachers held a debrief at the end of the lesson.
Here are some pictures of the class:
Teachers: Andy Chen (1.5 hrs), Aditya Verma (1.5 hrs), Brian Song (1 hr)