Tag: students

Best Tips For Teaching Students To Develop Their Scientific Writing Skills

Writing is not an easy skill, no matter how simple it may seem at a first glance. But, you need it to go through your education with success Everything is based on writing when in school and if you have good writing skills, you will do better in everything. Exams, essays and so on, all have a huge impact on your school results and they all require writing.

As a teacher, you need to help every single student improve their skills and acquire new writing skills. Your students will become better people as a result of this.

But, most teachers don’t realize that they will need to provide a lot of help for their students so that they can develop these skills. They have a responsibility to do this. While your students can improve your skills without working hard, you have to be there to make sure that they are doing a good job.

Follow these tips to help your students learn more and better:

Encourage good and penalize bad writing

Some teachers want to get good results but never want to do anything about it. They never motivate their students properly and if they want their students to work well, they have to ask for the results. Let your students know that they will get a reward for good writing and that they will be punished for bad writing. Let them know that those who make great efforts to write well while being thoughtful and clear will be able to get some extra points and better grades and that those who work less and make less efforts to write well will be penalized with negative points or worse grades.

Build their mindset

Clear rules and expectations are not always enough and they might not work on all of your students. So, you have to inspire them to create great papers by letting them know just how important writing skills are. This is motivating them rather than scaring them. “You can make them understand that good writing extends beyond just school and that it’s crucial for success. Give them examples of people who have succeeded in their life because of writing skills and people who failed because they missed out on learning how to write properly” says Delia Plants, copy-editor at Stateofwriting and Australian help.

Allow them to practice a lot

Every skill gets better with practice. Repetitive work makes it better and more high quality. Small changes in your routine will make it easy for you to organize practice lessons and you can do this every day. Ask for a small amount of words on a specific topic so that they can practice being succinct and brief while still going in-depth on a certain subject. It can be boring and tedious for them at first but their skills will definitely improve. They will start writing so much better than they did before and this will create a huge improvement in their life. Diversify topics and genres. They can write non-fiction one day and then put their imagination to good use and write fiction the next day, Involve them in homework, assignments, exams and so on.

Instruct them through the writing process

When you provide your students with an assignment, you should explain how they can start writing it and how they can make it through all of the elements of good writing. Take some time to talk with them and address their concerns and issues. You can emphasize the importance of creating an outline.

“You can also give them a good starting points and tell them about techniques, methods and so on that will help them save time and energy. They will be able to memorize these things and their skills will get better with time,” says Jorge Nesbit, editorial assistant at Oxessays and Academized.

Give feedback

You can also give them feedback during this process. You can share with them many different things about when they did well, what they did wrong, what they can still improve on etc.

Become their role model and mentor and share with them useful feedback.

Help them read a lot

Good writers are also experienced readers. You should give your students plenty of time to read and even create one assignments where they have to read a book every week. This will expand their vocabulary and help them write better.

While writing isn’t rocket science, you can help your students learn better and faster if you know how to do that. Use these tips to improve your student’s writing skills.

Nora Mork is an education journalist at Ukwritings and Boomessays. She is often invited to speak at online conferences and to contribute columns to Essayroo blog.

Bricks Which Are Lighter Than Air

by Anupum Pant

What would smoke look and feel like, if you could solidify it?

Aerogels

Although, first made in 1931, Aerogels are relatively newer materials and a tremendous amount of research is being done on them everyday. Lightest solids ever, Aerogels weighing about seven times lesser than air have been made. Their extreme properties have given a fascinating field of interest to students and scientists. [Read the last paragraph]

How are they made?
Aerogels, also known as solid smoke or frozen smoke are extremely light materials. They are made by a process called sol-gel process which involves removing all the moisture from a specially made gel (Hypercritical Drying). Although the procedure may sound simple, there is a lot of technology involved in making them. Moreover, practically usable Aerogels which can endure moist conditions and high stress conditions are much more challenging to make. Also, it is very expensive to make them. [They can be made at home – with costly equipment of course]

Why is it so light? 
The whole lot of porosity left inside due to drying of the gel is what makes it so light. You can think of them as a sponge which is hard like pumice. But, when you think of a sponge, remember that mostly Aerogels aren’t very resilient. That means, unlike sponge they won’t get back into the previous shape after they’ve been pressed a lot. They are much sturdier/tighter than sponges. A small (not very small; due to very low density they occupy large space) piece of Aerogel weighing just 2 grams has been shown to hold a 2.5 kg brick without deforming. Poorly made Aerogels, on the other hand can also not be very sturdy. They would deform with a hard press of a finger and stay deformed.

How light are they?
Agreed, they can be lighter than air, but the practical mass varies greatly. And they don’t float in air because, with air present inside them, they are slightly heavier than air (weight of air inside + solid material), but can be made to float in air by replacing the air inside it with Hydrogen or Helium. Their lightness and density is completely dependent on the amount of porosity included during the fabrication – which can be controlled. Also, the kind of gel used to make it, affects the weight of the final block. So a block with 3 feet in length, breath and height can weigh anything from 1 kg to just 160 gm.

Aerographite, a carbon Aerogel made by German material scientists from Kiel University and the Hamburg University of Technology, was said to have weighed only 0.2 mg per cubic centimeter. It was 5000 times less dense than water and 6 times lighter than air (counting only the solid material’s weight of course). [Published Paper]

Graphene Aerogel: As if that wasn’t enough, recently, Chinese material scientists developed a lighter material than Aerographite. It was based on Graphene. A Graphene Aerogel; seven times lighter than air. This one, unlike other silica Aerogels, can recover like a sponge after getting deformed. [Published Paper]

Other Properties

Aerogels exhibit various other desirable properties which make them useful for a myriad of applications [See the Wikipedia Article]. For instance, they are very good insulators of heat. A nicely made Aerogel block which is just under a centimeter thick can protect things from a direct flame. Other desirable properties are high surface area, high thermal and acoustic resistivity, low dielectric constant, and low refractive index.

Aerogels absorb water or moisture from the air and even from human skin easily. Handling them with bare hands can cause blisters. But, the ones which repel water have been made successfully by altering fabrication parameters. Also, if particles of it are inhaled, it can cause problems. Hence, hand gloves and respiratory masks are used to handle them.

I want to study interesting materials like these

If you think Aerogels and Wolverine’s claws are interesting things. You can make a career in researching materials like these by making a foray into Materials Science and Engineering. Most good universities offer a course in it. It is a budding field, growing at a rapid pace with loads of opportunities waiting for you.