Group 4 headaches

As part of the science part of their IB (International Baccalaureate) diploma, our lower 6th students have to complete something called a Group 4 Project.
We take the whole group off timetable for a couple of days, and they have to work together in small teams to carry out an experiment and then report their findings to the rest of the group. They are marked on their teamwork and presentations rather than the quality of the experiment.


In the past we have always given them around half a day to plan their experiment and draw up their requisition list and then we as technicians have a week to get the equipment together before the experimental session. This year, however, my HoD decided to let them start the experimental work on day 1. I can see some benefit as they are getting to try out and develop their ideas, but from a technician point of view it is turning out to be a nightmare!


Roughly every 90 seconds I'm getting a knock at the prep room door and usually find a queue of 3 or more students all wanting stuff. They're only asking for little things each time but it's adding up to one big headache especially as many of them are not physicists and don't really know quite what they want. I had one very sweet lad come down from biology who said 'I need something, I think it's called a power pack'. You should have seen the look of terror on his face when I asked what voltage he needed and whether he would like stepped or continuously variable. Then I had to show him how a croc clip works.


They've gone to lunch now, but will be back in about an hour. I'm tempted to lock myself in a cupboard and refuse to come out!

Busy afternoon ahead

Around a month ago, we got an email asking if we could come up with something to occupy 13 children who are coming to the college today to try for an academic scholarship. They'll have a day of tests and then we are supposed to keep them entertained for an hour. My HoD cheerily said yes, and then promptly forgot about it until yesterday!

Since this is now going to be a rather last minute event, I foolishly thought we'd do something simple. After all we don't know the students involved, althoough as they are scholarship candidates they must be pretty bright. Also they have never used our equipment before. HoD however had grander plans. He insisted that the activity for them had to involve dataloggers so we can show off just how technologically advanced we are. This could cause problems on its own. There are a wide variety of dataloggers used in schools and the ones we have are certainly not the most popular, so if the students have used dataloggers before they may well not be familiar with the ones we have. Of course, they may not have ever come across dataloggers at all.

So use of the equipment might prove to be an issue, but at least they'll all be doing the same thing right? Wrong!

HoD has decided on a circus of experiments. Each pair of students will have a different experiment to carry out, two with light gates, two with temperature probes, one with a position sensor and one with a light sensor.

 Apparently he also wants to take them to see the observatory.

All in the space of an hour.

It's going to be an interesting afternoon.

Need to know?

We have one set in year 11 who are following a totally different syllabus to everyone else. They are all new students from overseas who joined us this year because they want to take IB in the 6th form. There was no easy way to slot them into the IGCSE course which everyone else is taking, so they are doing Edexcel GCSE additional science instead. The HoDs have organised most of this between themselves - they even ordered their own textbooks!

This GCSE course has a 'controlled assessment' element - essentially it's coursework. I've known this was coming up for a few weeks because my HoD emailed me all the paperwork to have a look at so that I could order any extra equipment we need. This morning he asked me to go onto the Edexcel website and download the paperwork for bio and chem and then email it to the techs. This caused a certain degree of confusion. Neither of them apparently had any idea that this controlled assessment even existed, and in chatting to the bio tech I discovered that she hasn't been given any info about the A-level assessed practicals yet either.

It's weird how our HoDs have such different approaches. I've been given login details for AQA and Edexcel so I can go to their websites and find out all the information I need about the practicals. For A-level ISAs, I did it back in september, so I've had plenty of time to order the equipment, trial the practicals and am now in a position to advise the teachers so that the students have the best chance to do well. It sounds like the other 2 HoDs like to keep all the information close to their chests, but I can't see why.

You're never going to get the best technical support if you don't give the technicians the information they need. Maybe the difference is that I'm treated as an integral and trusted part of the team by all of my teachers. It sounds as though my colleagues aren't getting the respect they deserve.

A useful meeting!!

We had our regular termly technicians' meeting with the Head of Science yeaterday. My HoD was there too, because as from Easter next year he is taking over as HoS and so will be managing all 3 technicians, not just me.

It was quite a productive meeting for the most part. We highlighted the fact that since we switched to iGCSE the number of practical lessons has really increased and we are starting to get a bit frayed around the edges at times. It's been agreed that we are going to be more strict about requisitions being handed in on time. This has been a grumble of mine before and hasn't really improved over the past couple of months so we will see if a stern reminder from HoS changes anything. At least we now have his backing to refuse late requests if we are already swamped so that is a step forward.

The other main outcome is that teachers have been reminded that pupils should put equipment back where they got it from, and that teachers should be checking that everything is returned at the end of the lesson. Again this is something I've mentioned in the past so it will be interesting to see if anyone takes it seriously this time!

New Toy

I'm so happy! Yesterday, along with an order of batteries, magnets and all the usual stuff, I got this:

Can you guess what it is?

It's my new soldering iron kit. Isn't it beautiful?

I've needed a new soldering iron for ages and when I saw this kit, I just couldn't resist. It has 3 different sized bits and even a desoldering pump. Can't wait to get soldering. :)

ISA time

Got a lovely big parcel yesterday with all the bits I need to start preparing this year's AS and A2 ISAs. Obviously I'm not allowed to talk about what the ISAs consist of, but they don't look to be nearly such a pain to set up as some we've had in the past, which makes me very happy.

I'll be trialling the experiments over the next few weeks and then I expect we'll start doing all the practice ones. At least this year we have no GCSE ISAs.
Hooray for iGCSE!

Adapting dynamics trollies

Your basic dynamics trolley looks something like this:

We mainly use them for experiments on velocity or acceleration and generally use a light gate for the measurements. In order to break the light beam you have to attach some sort of 'sail' to the back of the trolley which up until now has generally been a piece of cardboard stuck on with sellotape or blu tack.

That was never really an ideal way to do it. For starters it looks a mess, and the sails are often not stiff enough and will bend or fold over and not break the beam as cleanly as we want. I've been trying to come up with a solution to this problem for ages and it suddenly struck me a couple of weeks ago.

I had a load of these clips in a drawer which I didn't really have a use for. I think they're for holding pipes or cables. My thinking was, if I attach the clips to the back of the trolley then they could hold and support the sail. Even better, I had some 10cm squares of hardboard which we used for an old ISA which I thought would make ideal sturdy sails.

Initially I just glued the clips to the trollies to see if the concept was sound, and the teachers loved it! I've now screwed the clips on and hopefully our velocity practicals will be a bit smoother now.

The finished article

ps. It's now half way through lesson 1 on tuesday. Still no requisition sheet from astroboy!

Requisition sheets

The concept of the requisition sheet or book should be one familiar to all senior school science teachers. It's the method by which they let me, the technician, know what equipment they need for each lesson.

My requisition book

There are various methods that I have heard of, but the one I prefer is for each teacher to give me a copy of their timetable with their requirments written in for each lesson. I then take the sheets and transfer all the information into my requisition book which is a day to a page and I can see instantly what the days lessons are looking like.

I like this method because as I'm transferring the information into my book I can see where there might be clashes or rapid turnarounds and it helps me plan my week.

This only works though, if the teachers get their sheets done in time. The official science departmant policy is that all requisitions should be handed in by Thursday lunchtime of the preceeding week. I give a little more leeway than that and have told my guys that Friday lunchtime is ok. But how many of them manage that?

Well, I have 4 teachers this year. 1 of them doesn't do much practical, but when she does, she manages to plan well in advance. This week she came and wrote in my book on thursday. NQT did his sheet on friday with a number of trips to the prep room to check what we have available. This is great, because it means that he has only asked for things that are actually possible. HoD did his sheet some time on sunday and emailed it to me. Not a huge amount of help since I didn't see it until this morning.

And then there's astroboy. Just lately he seems rather more interested in the observatory and astronomy club than the mundane business of teaching physics. It's currently half way through lesson 1 on monday morning and I have yet to see any sign of his requisition sheet. I guess this means he doesn't want any equipment this week?!

An offer I can't refuse...

The lovely people at Timstar currently have a 'Back to School' clearance brochure out with an extra special offer - if you spend £100 from the brochure they'll send you free biscuits!

Never one to pass up a freebie I duly placed my order, along with a load of other stuff from the regular catalogue. Sadly, the majority of the items I wanted from the clearance brochure are already sold out but they're going to send me the biscuits anyway! Hooray for Timstar!!

How hard is it?

I placed a small order a couple of days with a well known supplier of electrical bits and bobs. When ordering, I clearly stated 'please mark for the attention of labtech666'. (Well, actually I gave them my real name, but you know what I mean!)

Order arrived in school today with no name on it, so the office had to e-mail everyone to ask whose package it was.

So annoying! I couldn't have made myself any clearer and it's not the first time I've had this problem with this particular company.

In praise of steam engines

Yesterday one of my teachers did an energy transfers circus. The kids had various things to play with - torch, dynamo, pendulum, solar cell etc - and they had to think about what forms of energy were involved.

As a demo I gave him our lovely Mamod steam engine, which went down an absolute storm! The year 9 pupils had no idea such things existed, and several of them wanted to know where they could buy one.

I couldn't believe they'd never seen one before, but then I was brought up by an engineer and spent numerous childhood weekends wandering round steam rallies (I highly recommend Tinker's Park) looking at the real thing. There's nothing quite like the sound and smell of a steam engine, and I'm so glad some of our students got to experience it even on a small scale. :)

Just another monday morning!

We've already established that I am not a mind reader, but some of my teachers are continuing to vastly over-estimate my powers.

My HoD didn't get his requisition sheet for this week handed in by close of play on friday, and instead e-mailed it to me yesterday which meant that I didn't see it until first thing this morning. For lesson 2 today he's put down 'electromagnets'. That's all. Just 1 word.

Maybe he's doing a theory lesson and is going to talk to the class about electromagnets. Maybe he wants to do a demo or a class practical. I don't know, because he didn't say and I couldn't get hold of him before lessons began because he was in a meeting.

In the end I gave him a class set of long nails, lengths of wire and paper clips so that the class could make simple electromagnets. Amazingly that was what he'd wanted all along.

Maybe I am psychic after all!?!

But of course I'm psychic!

Right now everyone is teaching Forces and Motion. This means a lot of dynamics trolleys, masses, dataloggers and light gates are getting moved around from lab to lab.

Yesterday one of my teachers had ordered the full kit, plus the air track for a demo. I started getting it all set up in his lab during lunch break. He was sat at his desk eating his sandwiches and chatting to a student while I carried in trays of stuff and set them out on the side bench, before fetching the air track.

It must've taken me a good 5 minutes to get it all in place, at which point he piped up and said 'Oh, by the way Labtech666, I'll only need the air track today'.  'I thought you ordered the trolleys too' I replied.
'Yes I did', he said, 'but they don't get such good results so I decided to just do the air track demo'.

Fair enough, but wouldn't it have been nice if he'd said something BEFORE I started shifting loads of kit into his lab. He watched me do it for crying out loud!
Am I meant to be psychic and just know when they've changed their mind about a practical? Or maybe I should ask them before every lesson just to check.
Or, here's a novel idea, maybe they could have the courtesy to let me know what's going on.
Yeah, right!

Counting

If I put out a box of screw drivers labelled '10 PLEASE COUNT BACK', how many screw drivers do you think there should be in the box at the end of the lesson?

8? 9?

Nope. There should be 10. Why is that so hard to understand?

Because teachers don't bother to count we now have a kid somewhere in the school with a screw driver. Hope it turns up soon!

Handle with Care

I was just going through an old file, deleting stuff I don't need any more and came across this photo that I took a couple of years ago. I don't know whether it was the delivery company or the stewards here at school who caused my clearly fragile parcel to arrive in this state, but it made me laugh (once I'd checked that nothing was actually broken!).

Is that my job?

Every day I get asked to do a wide variety of stuff, some of which is very clearly a part of my job, but some of which really isn't. So, I present:

Stuff that's my job

• Preparing equipment for practical physics lessons and ensuring that it's in the right room at the right time.
• Repairing any bits of equipment which get broken. (Mainly changing batteries and fuses, sometimes a bit of soldering)
• Sourcing new equipment and dealing with ordering.
• Managing the budget
• Trialling new experiments eg ISA practicals
• Helping out in the lab during practicals
• Demoing experiments during lessons
• First Aid

Stuff that's not my job, but which I still get asked to do

• Booking plane tickets
• Invigilating exams when they can't find anyone else
• Contacting kids' parents
• Entering exam results onto the system
• Photocopying
• Setting work when a teacher is away but hasn't sorted out any cover
• Taking phone messages from my HoD's wife

And today's prize example - find out where the course is which my HoD is supposed to be on. Seiously, he called me at 9.15 to ask me to log on to his e-mails and check the venue for his course because he'd forgotten to write it down. Sometimes I despair.

Gold Leaf Electroscope

Got my Gold Leaf Electroscopes out this morning, ready for a lesson, only to discover that 4 of them have no gold leaf. Not a problem - I quite like fitting new gold leaf. It's a bit fiddly but not difficult.

Here is my 'how to' guide to fitting gold leaf.

Disclaimer - this is not the only way, probably not even the best way. It's just my way.

Remove any traces of old gold leaf or adhesive from the stem of the electroscope and clean off any grease with a little ethanol.

With the gold leaf (actually it's an alloy called dutch metal) between 2 thin pieces of paper, cut a strip 40mm by 5mm.

Cut a thin strip of sellotape and stick it to the top end of the gold leaf  then carefully position onto the stem. Reassemble electroscope and admire your handywork!

There's a guide here on the lovely TechKnow website which shows a different way to attach the gold leaf, using spit. I've not tried it, but it may be worth a try!

PAT Time

It's nearly Easter, which can mean only one thing.
No, not me stuffing my face with loads of chocolate (although I'm sure I will).
Nope, it's Portable Appliance Testing time again.

Because the testing always happens over the Easter holidays, I most likely won't be here when the PAT men are in so I need to get everything out onto the benches for them before we break up next week. There's a lot of portable appliances in physics. I've found somewhere in the region of 300 so far and everytime I think I've got them all, I turn around and see another plug waving at me.

The annoying thing is that half this stuff probably won't get tested anyway. Last year the PAT men managed to miss my prep room, and the year before they missed Lab 1. My money is on Lab 4 getting missed this year.