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24 March

Home-Based Learning Using Google Meet

Seng Kwang Tan Blog, Google Suite, Technology 0 Comments

I conducted an online lecture this morning using Google Meet for the students who had to stay home due to the Leave of Absence mandated by the Ministry since they had recently returned from another country during this period of the Covid-19 pandemic. I feel the need to document this as things might become bad enough that schools have to close, so it serves as a place where fellow teachers can pick up some tips on how to manage this.

The G Suite account that I used is that of my school’s, not MOE’s, because it allows me to record the session in case I need to show the session to students who did not “turn up” for the Meet. I am the G Suite admin for the school so I changed the setting to allow Google Meets to be recorded. After the session, the recorded Meet is automatically found in a G Drive folder after it has been processed in the backend. ICON’s Google Meet (part of MOE’s Google Suite service) does not allow recording.

My hardware setup is simple: just my laptop to capture my face and control the Google Meet UI and a second screen with which to show my slides. I also entered the Meet as another participant using my mobile phone as I wanted to see what my students would see for added assurance.

Google Meet is very user-friendly, with a minimalist and intuitive design that one can expect from Google (after all, that was what made it the preferred search engine in the early days of the internet). All we needed to do was to sign in to https://meet.google.com/ and start a session. You can also schedule a session on Google Calendar.

When a Meet is created, a URL is generated, which you can communicate to your students via text message or email, or through a system announcement.

When students log in, be sure to ask them to switch off their video and mute their voices so as not to cause any interference.

Note that what is shown in the presenter’s screen in Meet using the front camera of a laptop is laterally inverted as presenters generally want to see themselves as though they are looking at a mirror. So if you were to write things on a whiteboard or piece of paper, you will not be able to read the writing through your screen. However, rest assured that students can still read the writing if they are looking at you through the feed from your laptop’s front camera.

Instead, what I did was to toggle between showing my face on the camera and projecting a window or a screen.

For today’s Meet, I projected a window where my Powerpoint slides was on but did not go into slide mode (which will take up both my screens) as I wanted to be able to see the Google Meet UI at all times in order to know if anyone asked questions or raised an issue using the Chat function. This backchannel was very good as students could immediately tell me if they could see or hear me. I wanted them to be able to ask questions through that but nobody did, unfortunately.

A few times, I toggled to use the camera. Once, it was to show a simple physics demonstration which I felt added some badly needed variety.

For future sessions, I intend to project a single window with Chrome is so that I can project the slides using Google Slides in an extended mode. This will also allow me to switch to an online video with ease instead of selecting the window via the Google Meet UI, which might throw up too many options if one has many windows open (which I tend to do). I also intend to use Nearpod to gather some responses from the students.

12 December

Review of Sci-sational Christmas at Science Centre Singapore

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In a nutshell, Sci-sational Christmas offers value-for-money interactive family festive fun.

Open from 1 to 25 Dec 2019 at the Annexe of Science Centre Singapore, visitors will enter 3 main activity zones:

Zone 1: Hot vs Cold Experiments

Watch as two “elves” try to outdo each other by performing scientific demonstrations based on opposing ends of the temperature range – under very carefully controlled conditions of course.

The number of asterisks show the loudness of the explosion. The heat experiments in the “Fuel Efficiency Department” are:

  1. Lighting of a hydrogen balloon (**),
  2. Lycopodium powder combustion (*), and
  3. Ethanol-powered propulsion (***)

Over at the “Alternative Energy Department”, the elf tried to impress us with:

  1. Boiling of liquid nitrogen, increasing gas pressure to burst a balloon (***),
  2. Liquid nitrogen propelled plastic bottle rocket (*), and
  3. Liquid nitrogen cloud formation with hot water

To me as a science teacher, these experiments would have made the tickets worth the money already. After all, demonstrations like these are usually the highlight of science museums all over the world. But there are more…

Zone 2: Scented Candle Making

After exiting the first workshop, visitors are brought to the candle making workshop. We were each given a rubber mould, some melted soy wax, colouring and a few drops of liquid scents to make our own Christmas tree candles.

Do take care not to add too much colouring or the tree may not freeze evenly and hence, break easily. On hindsight, I should have used mainly non-coloured wax with a little green colouring for the base of the candle (to pour in last) to get a snow-covered Christmas tree.

Zone 3: Escape Room

The escape room offers plenty of fun for the kids in the group. There are clues planted all over Santa’s office and the session is facilitated by an “elf”. The aim is to unlock a number lock under the fireplace in the office for the kids to crawl out from.

There is a secret door for the grown-ups, though, so we need not worry about our outfit or painful knees.

The only downside is that visitors are placed in groups of 15-20, most of whom are strangers – unless you register as a big group of friends. However, most kids would often get quite involved and interactive despite not knowing one another.

I highly recommend this activity for families with kids aged 5-12. At a price of $15 that includes general admission to the Science Centre, it is far more worthwhile than a conventional escape room experience in Singapore and is something my own kids find meaningful and exciting.

I have a feeling that the Science Centre might organise more escape-room styled activities in future as they are quite the craze nowadays.

Visitors might want to note that the 3 zones would last a total of about 50 min. The entry timings are: 11AM, 12NOON, 1:30PM, 2PM, 2:30PM, 3PM, 3:30PM, 4PM and 4.30PM. You will need to indicate your preferred timing when purchasing the ticket and show up on time at the entrance, which is near the fire tornado exhibit.

13 September

one-north Festival 2019

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https://www.seriouslyscience.sg/one-north-Festival/Overview

Happening now from 13-14 Sept 2019 at one-north.

My colleagues and I took the opportunity to visit the exhibitions during lunch time today. I learnt about 3M’s solar films and retroreflection material, I^2R’s speech-to-text recognition app with code switching capabilities (i.e. the app is able to transcribe English-Chinese mixed sentences) and cell-based prawn meat from https://shiokmeats.com/, among other things.

There was also an informative booth on Project Wolbachia (where male aedes mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria are released into the wild to control the population). I learnt that they could separate the male from the females at the pupal stage because male pupals are larger and got to stick my hand in a box full of male Wolbachia-Aedes mosquitoes.

Very hands-on booth on Project Wolbachia.
Looking forward to a future where meat is grown in labs so as to reduce animal suffering

Do check out the apps developed by the Bioinformatics Institute that can be used for science experiments or related applications.
22 July

Iconic Voices from MIT: Opening a New Window into the Universe with Dr Nergis Mavalvala

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This is a free public lecture by Dr Nergis Mavalvala (an astrophysicist from MIT) on how her team detected gravitational waves generated from colliding black holes and neutron stars at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).  Held on this coming Friday 26 Jul 2019 from 5 to 6 pm, the venue is at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)’s Auditorium, along 8 Somapah Road, Singapore 487372.

Click here to sign up.

12 March

Updates

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I have not been posting in this blog for a while as I have been rather busy in my new role at the Ministry of Education HQ. My main area of work is related to the Singapore Student Learning Space, an online portal in which curriculum-aligned resources are made available for students in Singapore to learn anytime, anywhere. It’s about to be rolled out to all non-pilot schools soon, so I won’t be posting here for a while longer.

Until then, please let me know if there are any simulations or resources that you would like me to work on. Any such work will have to be during my free time, somewhere between rest and family time.

21 May

Water Wheel Challenge

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My school organises a competition for upper primary pupils in Singapore annually. Called the THINK Challenge, it gets participants to engage in problem-solving with a little help from the internet, team work and experimentation. “THINK” stands for the stages of the cycle of inquiry learning: Trigger, Harness, Investigate, Network and Know.

In this year’s Challenge, participants were tasked to construct a water wheel that is able to lift a 20g mass up a height of 30cm. This task is known as the “Trigger”. Participants were given 30 min on the internet to gather information while also “harnessing” their prior knowledge on energy conversions, frictional force, etc.

They were then given time during the “Investigate” phase to experiment and test out their prototypes. Our student facilitators then assisted to test the efficiency of their prototypes based on the amount of water used to lift the mass over the required distance.

In the “Network” phase, participants had to make a short presentation in front of a panel of judges, explaining the scientific principles involved, design considerations, limitations and suggestions for improvement.

Finally, the competition was wrapped up with a brief summary of the learning points in the “Know” stage just before handing out the prizes.

The winning teams this year were:

1st place: Maha Bodhi Primary School Team 1
2nd place: Bedok Green Primary School Team 1
3rd place: Haig Girls’ School Team 1

What Makes a Good Water Wheel?

Through this competition, we hoped that participants picked up new scientific knowledge through the inquiry-learning approach.

Some of the considerations needed when constructing and testing the water wheel include:

  1. Ways to reduce friction. Most participants realise early on that they need to allow the axle of the water wheel to turn with minimal friction. This means that they need to insert the chopstick given to them into a straw, and affix the water wheel to the straw while clamping the chopstick to a retort stand (a requirement for the competition). They also need to ensure that the string does not end up winding around the chopstick.
  2. Mass of water wheel. A heavy water wheel tends to be harder to turn due to a larger moment of inertia as well as greater friction at the axle.
  3. Finding an optimal height to pour the water from. They were given a bottle to pour out the water from and were allowed to pour the water from any height. While it makes sense to pour the water high above the wheel initially to achieve maximum gravitational potential energy, it was also resulting in inaccuracy and needless splashing of water.
  4. The type and arrangement of the water “buckets”. The buckets for carrying water in order to turn the wheel can be made of disposable cups or spoons, and should be arranged in regular intervals to ensure smooth rotation of the wheel. There has to be an optimal number of such buckets because if they are spaced too far apart, the lifted mass will turn the water wheel back in the opposite direction whenever the buckets are not doing work.

    This water wheel from Haig Girls’ School used only 201 g of water
  5. The position at which to tie the string to the weight. The mass to be lifted is attached to a string and this string has to be fixed to the turning wheel. If the string is tied too close to the circumference of the wheel, there may not be sufficient torque to lift the weight. If the string is too close to the axle, it will require more turns in order to lift the weight by the requisite height. The winning team managed to create an optimal distance between the string and the axle by using ice cream sticks.

The winning water wheel from Maha Bodhi School used only 123 g of water.