Teaching with Aperture

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Introduction

The idea behind Aperture is to have students working on authentic scientific tasks: evaluating evidence, and explaining phenomena by making and supporting claims using that evidence. In many cases, data are taken from scientific sources. In other cases, experiments and results are fabricated to lead students to foundational principles through questioning techniques.

One of the intended side effects of Aperture exercises is that students are exposed to technical writing and scientifically-formatted figures and tables. Aperture is also designed to support writing lab reports, giving them examples of titles, figure captions, and descriptions of results.

In the classroom

Aperture activities are designed to be more or less "print-and-play". Once students have been introduced to the format and spirit of making and supporting claims.