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Contents

IPS Assessment Package for the Seventh Edition

IPS Seventh Edition

A Computer Program that Generates Histograms-and Much More

Video Cassette ("Loops")


The Assessment Package for the Seventh Edition of IPS

As the changes in the Assessment Package between the Sixth and Seventh Editions of IPS were limited to one question in Chapter 6 and one question in Chapter 9 in each of the A and C Series, SCI has not published a Seventh Edition of the Assessment Package until now. Instead, schools ordering the Assessment Package for use with the Seventh Edition received the Sixth Edition plus a free package of replacement pages for those questions and answers.

Now that the supply of the Assessment Package for the Sixth Edition has been exhausted, we incorporated the changes in the printing and published it as the Seventh Edition. Schools in need of additional copies of the Assessment Package for the Sixth Edition will now receive the Seventh Edition plus the original pages of the Sixth Edition where the changes occurred. The price for the calendar year 2002 is $40.00.

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New! Introductory Physical Science Seventh Edition

SCI is pleased to celebrate the end of the twentieth century with the publication of the Seventh Edition of IPS. The Sixth Edition remains in print.

Compared to the changes made in the Sixth Edition, the changes in the Seventh Edition are minor, but still significant. Just browsing through the Textbook will demonstrate a great improvement in the clarity of the photographs, especially those of equipment being used in experiments. A number of older black and white photographs have been replaced, as have several drawings and computer-generated histograms.

Changes in content were made in Chapter 3, where a section on Boiling Point and Air Pressure has been added, and the section on The Hydrometer has been deleted. (Most car batteries are now sealed, making the illustration obsolete.)

In Chapter 6 the experiment on The Decomposition of Sodium Chlorate has been deleted. The Heating of Baking Soda in Section 1.1 gives students an experience similar to that gained by the Decomposition of Sodium Chlorate. An expanded introduction to Chapter 6 has further smoothed the flow of ideas.

In Chapter 9 the experiment on The Size and Mass of an Oleic Acid Molecule has been rewritten. The results are more convincing, as has been shown by field testing. These changes in the Text resulted in the addition and deletion of a few questions at the end of sections and chapters.

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A Computer Program that
Generates Histograms and Much More

 

Long-time IPS users will recall the IPS Courseware, which asked pertinent questions, and checked measurements and calculations related to IPS experiments. Today, users demand versatile, multipurpose software. Therefore, rather than creating new dedicated IPS software, we looked for a quality graphing program that incorporates a routine for constructing histograms the way IPS students learn to construct them. The result is KaleidaGraph 3.09, Student Edition, published by Synergy Software in Reading, PA. The improvement in the quality of the output can be seen by comparing Figures A and B with the corresponding figures on page 34 in the text. As discussed both in the Sixth and Seventh Editions of IPS, the Student Edition of KaleidaGraph lets the user select the bin size, the reference value, and the location of the reference value (center or border).

KaleidaGraph is very powerful, fast, and user friendly. It is widely used by engineers and scientists. In fact, many of the graphs in the Seventh Edition were created with KaleidaGraph. The Student Edition of the software will easily satisfy all the data analysis and graphing needs of your students throughout high school in biology, chemistry, physics, and other courses.

The Student Edition of KaleidaGraph accommodates up to 20 columns and 512 rows in each data window—over 10,000 values in all! This is more than enough to compare the results of 15 classes. The full version of KaleidaGraph accommodates over 8 million data points but does not include the IPS histogram routine, and costs substantially more.

The Student Edition of KaleidaGraph is available on a CD ROM disk that contains both Macintosh® and Windows® versions. On each kind of computer, the disk loads a version optimized for that individual computer (e.g., Mac Plus, Power Mac, or PCs with operating systems Windows 3.1, Windows 95).

The Student Edition of KaleidaGraph is available only from Science Curriculum Inc.

Order Item No. SCI-032-7645 (for Macintosh and Windows), Price: $62.00

Please mail purchase orders to:

Science Curriculum Inc.
24 Stone Road
Belmont, MA 02478-3521

Or fax purchase orders to:

617-489-2282

For additional information about the software and network licenses, please call toll free

1-888-501-0957.

Another example of a KaleidaGraph histogram.

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Video Cassette ("Loops")


For teachers who are not familiar with the "Loops," a few words of explanation may be in order. When the IPS "Super-8" film loops were first produced about 25 years ago, the four-minute time constraint challenged the ingenuity of the IPS Group. In four minutes all the essential parts of every demonstration had to be shown, data had to be collected, and, in some cases, graphed to arrive at conclusions. The equipment had to be simple to encourage teachers and students to do the demonstrations themselves. The result was a collection of film loops unsurpassed in clarity and conciseness even in this age of computer-interfaced demonstrations. Far from being a disadvantage, the absence of sound lets teachers add their own comments or questions as they see fit.

The first three loops on the cassette are in the order in which they appear in the Seventh Edition, although they are equally useful with earlier editions. Those teachers who have not yet upgraded to the Sixth Edition of IPS will find Loops 4-7 relate to Chapter 12 of the Fifth Edition. Loops 8-10 will enrich any course addressing the kinetic theory of gases.

Contents:
  1. Radioactive Substances I Shows how Figure 7.2 in the Sixth Edition is produced from Figure 7.1. It also checks the same six substances with a Geiger counter.

  2. Radioactive Substances II Shows the construction and operation of a diffusion cloud chamber (Figure 7.12).

  3. Motion of Electric Charges in Vacuum Takes apart a diode and demonstrates under what conditions a current will flow through the diode (Figures 12.9?12.13).

  4. Molecular Motion and Diffusion A most convincing demonstration of how differently a drop of bromine evaporates in the presence of air and in a vacuum.

  5. A Sphere-Gas Machine Shows qualitatively the relation between volume and pressure, and between volume and temperature for a "gas" made of small steel spheres.

  6. How Does the Thermal Expansion of Gases Compare? The thermal expansion of equal volumes of three gases is simultane-ously observed over the same temperature range. The readings for all three gases are shown to lie on the same curve.

  7. How Does the Thermal Expansion of Liquids Compare? The thermal expansion of equal volumes of three liquids is simultane-ously observed over the same temperature range. The readings for the three liquids are shown to lie on different curves.

  8. A Disk Gas (An Analog) Introduces the operation of a unique "puck table" on which the floating pucks are kept in motion by vibrating pucks on the boundary, providing a much better analog than other puck tables to a real gas in a container.

  9. The Distribution of Speeds in a Mixture of Disk Gases Measures the distribution of speeds of a mixture of pucks representing two gases of different molecular mass at the same "temperature." The lighter pucks are shown to have a higher average speed.

  10. How does the Effusion Time of Gases Compare? Compares the effusion time of equal volumes of carbon dioxide and hydrogen and raises the question of the relation between these times and the molecular masses of the two gases.

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