Fission for meaning and understanding

As I think about my experiences in education and readings I have done for the MAC program, I have come to an understand of the importance of cultural relevance of lessons. Teachers will never be able to draw students' full attention unless they make the lessons relevant, interesting, and building upon past knowledge (schema!...I love using educ511 terms). Of all the thousands of lessons I have participated in my life, the most memorable ones were the ones that were interactive as well. As I think about creating a lesson plan for the tsunami activity in EDUC 504, I would like my lesson to focus on biology or physics (I am a physics major after all) and be interactive. In designing this lesson I could take this lesson in many ways. For physics I could focus on how an earthquake can create tsunamis to drive a discussion on transverse waves. Or I could look at the nuclear power plant crisis to push a discussion on the basics of nuclear fission. I can also take the nuclear power plant crisis as a motivating topic for a discussion on the effect of radiation on human disease. 

I also would like to make my lessons interactive. Science by its very nature is hands on. While I was searching the web I found a cool collection of interactive java simulations of the process of nuclear fission from the University of Colorado. Students can use this java program to simulate the process of fission in a nuclear reactor and determine the important properties driving a chain reaction.