Week 2 Readings

     Our Week two readings gave us a look at  three very interesting topics. The first an incite into a fictional  yet poignant 15th century dialogue concocted by   Italian   astronomer Galileo Galilee. In the text Galilee   during his three day problem solving session looks to challenge  the idea of Pythagoras's triangle, and  what would later be known as Newton's Third Law Every Action contains an opposite or equal reaction among other popular theories of the day. He uses terms such as momentum, and velocity to take the reader there and almost fold them into and integrate them into the debate.  All Topics discussed such as gravity and  equilibrium  in figures50 -55 are all studied today in modern introductory physics classes. Although it was a very tedious read this text is  really the base for all modern physics books used to date  and should be there for  respected and taught more from.

      The second although much shorter also included key physics concepts . The Disciplinary Integration of Digital Games for Science Learning  pitted the question of are Kip (Knowledge In Practice) and Sap (Science In Practices) benefit early childhood cognitive development  through modeling ?   The Kip prospective  theorizes that the students memory contains all the pieces to understand the concept ,but those pieces must be cemented together in the form of a game that challenges them and draws from each individual part of their learning experience. The can be used to instruct students in their  disciplinary  priorities" . This means they can further reinforce concepts taught in the class room and make it applicable to them. A maze or even a friendly game of Madden can show the concepts of force velocity inertia and torque.  The Sap aspect it was found that both theories are changing the mentality from games that focus on  conceptual integration to those of  disciplinary integration.Modeling is described as "fictions  representations of the real things". For instance if an individual while playing a game of Assassins Creed must although unintentionally master a kinematic equation the correct velocity to shoot the arrow in the x or y direction the time it takes before they are spotted the acceleration that they must run and  to  grab the objective take out an opponent  to  complete a particular level. This  was a very interesting read and I would be very interested in finding out more on the subject

   The third reading was  written by Vanderbilt Professor Richard Leher and focus's on developing Disciplinary Dispositions and modeling natural systems. Leher states that this is one of the most important and influential ways of forming and expressing knowledge . Yet he also says that because of this fact different methods have been fiercely debated through out  academia. In this article Leher suggest  ideas such as Task Analysis /Identity / Allowing students to design their own experiences. This will allow  students to take an important step in figuring out how they learn best and do well in their academic pursuits