Andrew Lyman-Buttler

science educator / physician in training

About me / Curriculum vitae
Work samples
Moodle resources
Chemistry quiz bank for Moodle - free download

Projects:

Choose Your Own Labventure: a lab interpretation guide for clinicians
Retrieval practice and effective assessment in secondary science: a blended approach (essay) (slides)
CompoundIt! - the chemistry formula word game

Latest posts

Dual source heating - when to switch?

I made a spreadsheet to determine when to use a gas furnace and when to use a heat pump if you have both.

The tradeoff depends on several factors:

Heat pump quality and outdoor air temperature: Heat pumps don't create heat, they extract it from outside air using the …

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Using power grid data to automate EV charging

MISO, which operates the power grid for much of central North America, has a public API that you can use to access real-time production data. You can turn this into a Home Assistant sensor by adding the following code to your configuration.yaml:

rest:
  - resource: 'https://api.misoenergy.org/MISORTWDDataBroker/DataBrokerServices.asmx?messageType=getfuelmix&returnType=json'
    scan_interval: 3…

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Choose Your Own Labventure

https://lymanbuttler.com/lab.html

As an 80s/90s kid, my favorite library find was the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. ("To investigate the anomaly, turn to page 44. To return to base, turn to page 27.") One unique feature among children's literature that the series embraced was bad endings; y…

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Open letter regarding the proposed UST sports facilities at the Ford site

Dear Mayor Carter, Council members, members of the Planning Commission, and community organization officers:

We are writing in opposition to the University of St. Thomas proposal to alter the Ford site plan to build sports facilities. There are two compelling reasons to reject this plan: tax …

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CDD: A Pox On Our City

The Minneapolis school district, in the midst of perhaps the most disruptive event in public school history (COVID-19), has approved a plan that will compound the disruption in the name of furthering equity, with Arneson, Ali, Caprini, Ellison, Inz, and Pauly voting yes 6-3. Since bandying about the word "equity" is …

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Ed Graff's shell game

Minneapolis Public Schools held their first public info session last night on Comprehensive District Design (CDD), which is being marketed as an ambitious school desegregation plan. The district claims that, by changing attendance zones, eliminating K-8 programming, and making a number of other fairly drastic changes, six "Racially Identifiable…

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Is CDD snake oil?

Minneapolis Public Schools has recently announced its desire to drastically shake up where most students attend school and how they get there in a program they're calling Comprehensive District Design. (Full disclosure: I have a child in a district school, one that we selected in part because of its K-8…

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use this Excel template to aggregate data from your classroom assessments

You've already incorporated best practices like interleaved practice, spaced rehearsal, and retrieval practice, but how do you know your teaching is working? How do you know your students have retained content you taught them a few months ago?

Your gradebook gives you a limited, myopic view of progress made by individual students. M…

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Organic nomenclature with Moodle

We had some time left over this year after finishing the regular curriculum, so I added on a short organic nomenclature unit. Tim Hunt and the Open University team maintain an outstanding Moodle plugin that uses the JSME Molecular Editor to accept student line drawing input, convert it to a SMILES …

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Write one set of questions and upload it to Kahoot and Moodle

I use Kahoot to review before tests and Moodle for quizzes, but sometimes I want the same question set for both. After spending way too much time typing the same questions twice, I made an Excel file based on the official Kahoot! upload template and wrote a second tab that…

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