First Presentation

I've been meaning for a while to post the first presentation I gave, but every time I thought to do so, I was never on the computer on which it was actually stored. Finally though, here is the link: first presentation. I feel that this first attempt was a pretty profound flop. I think I overestimated the students' prior knowledge when I was assembling the material, and underestimated the amount of time needed to present the material, which in turn caused many of the students to lose interest (though that may have already occurred in the first few minutes).

In my mind, I had envisioned talking about the different ways units are standardized, starting with time and length, which are based off of natural constants, an then mass, which is still just a block of metal. I thought the irony of that was kind of amusing, but I think I was the only one in the room who thought so. Part of the problem was that I don't think the idea of basing a unit off of a natural constant--or at least the ones I talked about--made sense. I didn't anticipate most of the class not knowing what an atom was, or at least having a vague concept of what it might be, so the time standard didn't go over so well. I didn't expect that they would know what a light-second was, but I figured that would be fairly easy to explain, though that was assuming they were familiar with the concept that light travels. Again, another flop. Of course, I tried to fill in these gaps during the presentation, but it was hard to quickly explain fundamental concepts like that in a way that allowed the students to immediately understand significance of how they connected to the rest of what I was talking about. Anyway, when I came to my big punchline, "And the mass standard is just a block of metal! Crazy, huh?"--no, I didn't deliver it quite such a cheesy manner--I could hear a chorus of crickets.

In the presentation I included a couple of little cartoons I had drawn containing visual puns, hoping to add some level of entertainment, but I'm not sure if anyone got them.

In the second part of the presentation, I wanted to communicate the importance of keeping attaching proper units to all measurements and to make sure conversions are used where they're needed, so I referenced the famous NASA Mars orbiter fiasco where the orbiter was destroyed because of unit mix-up. A few of the students perked up when they heard about expensive things getting destroyed, though they seemed to be more interested in Mars exploration missions than in unit conversions. That was okay by me though, since at least a few of them were engaging me at this point and asking questions.

On the last slide of the presentation, I included a couple of equations that I was going to use to explain what a Newton is (the unit leading to the NASA failure). By that time though, I realized that given what I perceived to be a lack of interest and/or understanding of the first half of the presentation, I wasn't going to try to explain new concepts right at the very end. If I recall correctly, I gave this presentation the day after I started realizing the very disparate levels of math preparation in the class, so I decided that if simple fractions were difficult for some, introducing the concept of units as fractions wasn't a good idea at this juncture in time.

All in all, I think this first presentation was more of learning experience for me than it was for the students. Hopefully next time, knowing what I know now, those roles will be reversed.