Today we are working with the Vernier Labquests to try to act out some motion. A quick thanks to Fran Poodry (@MsPoodry) and @VernierST for helping me find the motion matching on the Labquests.
I gave the students several different setups that they would need to complete. I ended up not using the random motion generators on the Labquest because I will want to talk about these with the class tomorrow.
The big goal was for the students to take the single given representation and translate it into all of the others. Then after they made their predictions, they would go and use the Labquest and motion detector to validate their claim. If they were wrong, then they would re-correct their misrepresentation. So far it has not gone as smoothly as I would have liked. It seems like I probably have them working on too many motions at once.
In 7th Period I switched it up a bit. I gave the whole class a single x-t graph and told them to recreate the different representations that went along with it. I gave them 5 min and then we shared it out with the class. We did a whole class demonstration with the detector and had the participant re-enact the word description. It worked well enough. We then had them repeat the exact same process, except this time we had the detector setup to collect the velocity vs. time. This graph looked reasonable (minus the small fluctuations from each step) and we discussed how to create a v-t graph.
I gave them another two problems to predict and test with the motion detectors. They didn’t have a whole lot of time, but it went better than the first two classes.
The next steps for tomorrow is to clear it up a little for the rest of the classes. We also will jump into creating translating into and out of v-t graphs.
ANuetzel 180 Days of CP Physics 