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May 2011

What's New?

 

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Coming in June
The arrival of BLOSSOMS new, web 2.0 web site - enabling teachers to comment upon and share their experiences with the BLOSSOMS lessons and also to create their own video lessons!
Fingerprinting Gravity: Constructing Your G-Map
fingerprinting gravityThis lesson from Jordan, now available in English voiceover, uses the Simple Pendulum experiment to enable students to answer the fundamental question: What is the value of g in my school and in my home? Students will learn to calculate this value by working in groups to make pendulums of different lengths and by learning to count pendulum oscillations. Watch it now.
BLOSSOMS Teacher, Walter Lewin, out with New Book
Book JacketMIT Professor Emeritus, Walter Lewin, has a new book entitled For the Love of Physics. According to Bill Gates, this book “captures Walter Lewin’s extraordinary intellect, passion for physics and brilliance as a teacher. Hopefully, this book will bring even more people into the orbit of this extraordinary educator and scientist.” Read about the book and about Prof. Lewin’s final MIT lecture here. And watch his BLOSSOMS video lesson, “Ice Skater’s Delight: The Conservation of Angular Momentum.”

A Newly Available Math Resource
LadybugBLOSSOMS recommends the web site, Mathematics as a Second Language, for teachers, school administrators and students. Here you will find free, online video math lectures by the incomparable Herb Gross, Professor Emeritus of Bunker Hill Community College and former lecturer at MIT. His arithmetic and algebra video lectures are uniquely clear in presentation and intuition, with friendly and intuitive yet precise presentation of both simple and difficult concepts. And the goal of his “Calculus in Every Day Life” course is to relate the basic concepts of Calculus to ideas we encounter in our lives every day. Check it out!

Look for these Physics
Lessons Coming Soon
to MIT BLOSSOMS

Uniform Circular Motion and Centrifugal Force

car


The Physics of Racing Cars

 

The Physics of Baseball
Meet a BLOSSOMS
video teacher
Paola Rebusco
is a Physics Lecturer at MIT. She is a theoretical astrophysicist, playing with mathematical toy-models that try to explain X-ray observations of accretion disks around compact objects and of clusters of galaxies. In her free time, Paola contributes to making scientific knowledge more accessible to lay people, both by writing scientific articles for the general public and by her regular participation with the Italian radio program, Moebius, commenting on astronomical images and news. Read more about Paola here and watch her two MIT BLOSSOMS videos, The Science of Soap Bubbles, part 1 and part 2.
Can you suggest a
BLOSSOMS topic?
Is there a concept you cover in mathematics, science or engineering that you find difficult to teach to your students? Do you think creation of a BLOSSOMS video lesson around that concept would be valuable to you in your teaching? Tell us out about it at: blossoms@mit.edu.