Mental Models

I have been spending the first classes this year for my regents students working with the idea of mental models. I discuss the rationale briefly in my course outline. The activity itself is derived from the FOSS Models & Designs curriculum, but I have thrown in an additional twist. I will post a fuller description of the activity itself after my students have finished with it, but basically it's literally a black box with something going on inside that students have to figure out using the sounds it makes and the feeling of it as the thing inside the box (a marble? a battery? a rock? were some of the hypotheses) moves around.

It is a great model of the scientific process, involving observation, reasoning, asking questions, testing, collaboration & communication. So far I think the activity is going over well, despite a good deal of necessary frustration and the usual attempts to circumvent the process (i.e., cheat). I try to look at this in a positive way, acknowledging the importance of curiosity and our need to know, while at the same time comparing it to a video game, in which the fun is all in playing the game, not necessarily getting to the end of the game or "winning"- what fun would a video game be if there were a cheat button where you could immediately destroy all the bad guys and win - game over. In this activity, the contents of the box are trivial and unimportant - it's the process of discovery that matters, how we figure out what's in the black box.

The twist that I've added to the FOSS idea will allow students to use a new "technology" to gain a better understanding of what's going on. I won't reveal the twist until the students have gone through it. I will say, however, that the idea came to me while reviewing the history of the discovery of the atom and it's structure. Thompson's "plum pudding" model (no nucleus) was replaced by Rutherford's (and later Bohr's) nuclear model (electrons "orbiting" a central nucleus). Rutherford came up with the model after experiments in which alpha particles were fired at gold foil - most went straight through the foil, but a few bounced back, a phenomenon incompatible with the idea of an atom with uniform density, and thus the tiny, dense, central nucleus was postulated. Suddenly it occured to me...TBA