Lava Lamp

This past semester I brought a Lava Lite® Lamp into my classroom. Why bring such a thing into class? Many of today's students are part of the “retro” movement. They buy clothes from the '60s, they wear their hair like people did in the '60s, and they look for the ideals and themes related to living in the 1960s. Physics education reform is also examining ideas from the “retro” world of science. This was the post-Sputnik era, a time when science was done by actually doing it and not necessarily by lecturing about it. Cliff Swartz, former TPT editor, once mentioned during a presentation at a Texas AAPT meeting, “The world of physics teaching is cyclic, like a swinging pendulum. We as physics teachers jump from ‘new ideas’ back to our old ones, each generation testing what works best for them.”