An atom is the thousandth part of... Or what is really the size of an atom (Part 2)

After a complicated week I'm back ! :)

So last time we talked about the atom I pointed out some of the preconceptions my students had before staring the class.

What I learned was that even though they knew the atom was really small when it cam to sizes. So maybe if small was difficult to grasp maybe big sizes would be easier.

So I asked "What do you think is 10^18 m" Some said

1) The size of the state
2) The size of the continent
3) From here to my house

So big distances were also difficult to see.

WHAT MY CLASSED LOOKED LIKE

The first thing I did was help them see how much bigger is 10^1 to 10^2 and so on....
I showed them a video probably most of you have already seen "Powers of Ten"

They were really fascinated by it !!!!!!

After that we discussed a little bit about what they used to think and how the video changed their minds and it was pretty enriching.

Then we watched another video this time about the atom and its size

This video was created by TedED and I think they did a wonderful job at trying to explain how small an atom is. They video is also really fun to watch.

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QUESTION: Learning by watching videos in class counts as informal education???
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After the video more discussion followed specially to make some clarifications on the density of the atom explanation, but overall they seemed to finally start to have an idea of how small the atom is.

I'll write the third and last part of this class over the weekend, but I hope you have enjoyed it so far :)

PVR