Need spectrography and HR diagram drill sheets? Here you go!

In ongoing PD news, you can still register for the Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit; 9 videos, 9 days. The videos will be available until Dec. 31. Follow the fun at #ditchsummit on Twitter.

I'm still trying to put together my blogs for the fall PD I've been doing, but for now I wanted to share a few things I'm really excited that I figured out how to do.

Inspired by Robert Prior many years ago, I started coding a lot of Excel spreadsheets as randomized drill sheets on many topics. My goal for this year is to get most of them up as Google Sheets so I can publish them to the web and students can go straight to my website to print out an infinite number of sheets.

Anyway, I've also been working on adding new, richer sheets to my catalogue. In particular, I was very jazzed last year when I figured out how to get a spreadsheet to draw spectrographs (hint: error bars). And last night I spent far too long working on how to get a Hertzsprung-Russel diagram (yay for the Bubble chart, boo for the fact that the labels are arbitrarily hidden when you go to a larger font).

Behold, I give you my Spectrograph and HR diagram drills for the grade 9 space unit (and Earth and Space science, too).

I'm still working on the HR diagram answers; I have to figure out how best to get it to choose whether it's on the main sequence or not. Also, I think I need more white dwarf stars, because that area is looking pretty sparse.

However:

 If you'd like to see my other drill sheets, head on over to the drill sheet section of my course webpage. It's very much a work in progress. I have a lot more sheets than I've listed there.

How large is the proton? York University Wednesday Dec. 6

I have completely fallen down on my plan to blog at least once biweekly. I'm going to catch up on blogging all the PD I've been doing though, and I'm going to try to get them done before the break.Consider it a pre-holiday present.

For TDSB teachers, make sure to sign up for the Technology-Enabled Learning sessions (aka the after school workshops) on K2L. For LN24, there are a number of sessions you can still attend this and next month.  Note the change to the Virtual Library session. Sign up now!

Wednesday night I attended York U's open-house night for high school physics teachers. hosted by the Physics and Astronomy Department. It's a great evening of PD, not just because they serve dinner with wine, but also it's a chance to learn about some of the ground-breaking research taking place right now. The topic this year was "How large is the proton?  ̶   the proton size puzzle".

During dinner, there were three 15-minute talks, which is an excellent length. The first was from Dr. Randy Lewis. He talked about how my previous 3-quark understanding of the proton (seen below in the basic Wikipedia image)...

By Arpad Horvath (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

...is incomplete; the masses of the three quarks make up less than 1% of the mass of the proton. In reality, at least as far as we currently understand, what we have is much more complicated: at any given time, uncountable pairs of quarks and anti-quarks are appearing and disappearing (along with the associated gluons), and the whole thing somehow makes sure that three valence quarks are always unpaired, as in the picture below, grabbed from phys.org

The blue circle isn't really there. As with everything, protons are mostly empty space. The green circles represent quarks, the orange antiquarks, and the springs are gluons.

Because of this hurricane of energy, current theoretical attempts to calculate the size of the proton aren't there yet, so we need to turn to experiment (the subject of the next two talks).

Dr. Eric Hessels firstly blew our minds by telling us that because of this  –            We can determine the size using atoms – but atoms with electrons and atoms with muons give different answers.
Dr. Marko Horbatsch –    Maybe scattering electrons off of protons can determine the size – but maybe it can’t.