PERCEIVING
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought" (Root-Bernstein, 44). This quote is directly related to my understanding of perceiving because it emphasizes looking at something familiar in a different way. When I started brainstorming about my topic of teaching science through sports, the first thing I thought of was using a basketball to teach gravity.
My Initial perception was based on purely one sense - vision. When teachers teach and students learn about gravity through a basketball, it is traditionally all about watching what happens with the basketball. As I began reimagining the basketball falling, the first new sense I engaged was hearing. Teachers might bounce a basketball to teach about gravity, but, intriguingly, might not engage students with the significant corresponding auditory experience.
When I isolated this new sensory variable, the first significant science connection I noticed was that the time between each bounce became shorter as the video played.
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This immediately made me think of a new topic within third grade physical science that could be taught with basketballs - the relationship between distance and time. As the bounces (the distance the ball travels) gets shorter, the time it takes the ball to reach the ground again (and make the noise) gets shorter as well. Simply adding a new sense to my perception had made basketballs more useful for teaching science.
The added benefit of reimagining basketball science through sound was that through my reflection, I noticed that I was observing and isolating variables, engaging in the scientific process. After this realization, I began thinking about science experiments that my students could do with basketballs, specifically an experiment where the variable is the type of surface and students practice their observation and comparison skills by bouncing basketballs on the different surfaces and recording their results. Students could then engage in an elementary friendly form of rule discovery, learning through inquiry about the relationship between surfaces and the height a ball will bounce. Thinking more about sound and experiments, I thought of another activity where students could compare the height a ball is dropped from and the sound it makes on the different surfaces that it bounces on, sharpening both their understanding of the scientific method and auditory perceptiveness.
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Reflecting more on the sound itself, rather than the scientific variables related to it, I thought of how similar it sounds to students tapping pencils.
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As I discovered on YouTube, pencil tapping is not, however, merely an annoying student habit, but can instead be used to make music. Then, I thought, so can basketballs!
My first thought was: ok, an interesting connection, but now we're not talking about science, just another discipline that can use basketballs to teach concepts. Upon further reflection, however, I realized that the music of basketballs is related to physical science because it is based on variations in sound waves. Thanks to this assignment, and some simple auditory perception changes, I was able to expand my skill set for using basketballs to teach science.