Physics -- the only class where you can get an A for hitting a teddy bear with a water balloon from 20 yards!
Projectile motion is my favorite unit to teach, but we need the Logger Pro software in order to perform video analysis on an object's motion to understand its behavior.
My Honors and AP Physics students are a lively bunch.
They absolutely love it when I give them activities that allow them to explore the physical world for themselves. With high-stakes testing given high priority in my district, many teachers stick with drilling hundreds of problems and teaching to the test. These students are full of creativity, and when given the opportunity to express it the results are amazing! By the end of the year, we have so many inside jokes from weird stuff that went on during labs or discussions that it feels like a family.
My Project
Logger Pro will allow us to analyze the motion of any object of our choice using video analysis. By putting a meter stick in the shot and tracking its x and y position vs. time, the students can generate many of Newton's conclusions on their own. Boring formulas will no longer be memorized, because their conceptual understanding will be so deep from having already seen it with their own eyes.
We will analyze:
A ball bouncing across the room (constant x velocity, downward y acceleration)
A mass oscillating on a spring (show its sinusoidal position vs. time and velocity vs. time graphs as an application of trig learned in previous classes)
Collisions (momentum conservation)
Basketball shot prediction (determine make or miss based on the first half of the ball's flight)
And those are just the simple examples of what it can do. These students will be our future engineers, and it's incredibly important that their math/physics training be more than solving problems from a dull text!
My hope is that having more advanced work in physics class will inspire several students to take much needed fields like engineering, teaching, or even politics with a strong understanding of the real science behind the issues/numbers.
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