The UC Berkeley Physics department has a list of useful labs and
demonstrations. (http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/physics/physics.html) There
are literally hundreds of hands-on activities for most, if not all, topics
in high school Physics. Some of these demonstrations can be done with
household items while others require more elaborate setups. (The later can
be used as labs.) The focus here will be on the demos students can
recreate on their own. Specifically, students should be able to
demonstrate and explain a physics concept to a class. By no means should
this be expected within the first month, but this is a realistic
expectation near the end of the course.
The teacher can and should do most of the demos in the first few weeks of
school. However, the memory reference for students becomes more difficult
as more demos are done because the teacher is the one always doing them. To
aid students in remembering the demos, students could do them instead. At
first, the teacher could plan out the demos and ask for volunteers in
advance. The teacher could show the student volunteers what to do and what
to say. Then, both the demonstrator and the class will have a unique
reference frame of the presentation as well as a different emotional
connection. This will increase the chance that the event is remembered and
recalled with ease. Later, the teacher could make the demonstrations an
assessed requirement for all. The goal is for the teacher to give a
student (or small group) a lesson that will be taught in a few weeks and
have the student find, execute and explain a demo that compliments the
lesson to the entire classroom.
Does anyone have any additional tips from experience with doing something
similar in the classroom?