10-7-09 - Mirror Writing

Before we got to the activity for the day, we spend some much needed time discussing assignments and making sure we were all on the same page. Our class seems to struggle keeping everything straight, but it is hard to keep up when either the instructor or students miss class. Another factor that I believe influenced this problem is that fact that we are not use to using D2L as the main source for finding class assignment; we are much more comfortable having a paper schedule in front of us with every assignment and the due date explicitly explained. I’m not saying one way is better than the other; it just is harder for some of us to adjust to a new way of doing things. But, isn’t this kind of like dealing with children’s misconceptions with science. We also took a couple of minutes to discuss judging the science fair.

Moving onto today’s activity, we did an investigation on learning and memory. In this investigation, we were to write our names and symbols by looking into a mirror instead of at the pencil. This was a very difficult thing to do. I found that it was much easier to do if you didn’t look at the mirror or the pencil when you wrote, but that is kind of defeating the purpose of this lab. I think that the real purpose of this lab was to pay attention to how we learned how to adapt to writing in the mirror. But because of our long discussion, we ran out of time to really discuss this activity and what we learned from doing it.