Measuring Motion

Ms. V is a high school physics teacher with the good fortune to live in a community with a popular amusement park nearby. For several years she has taken a class field trip to the park and had the students do a variety of experiments that illustrate principles of force and motion. Unfortunately, the experience has been a bit frustrating. To measure acceleration, Ms. V has had the students build a multidirectional accelerometer out of a plastic tube using springs and a fishing weight. While the devices do demonstrate differences in force, they simply lack the precision to provide accurate data so that students can calculate forces such as vertical or centripetal acceleration and reach that, "Aha!" moment where they realize that the math behind physics really works!

This year, Ms. V is hoping things will be different. Most of her students have smartphones and Ms. V has found a free app for those phones that a colleague recommended called Physics Gizmo. She decides that she will present the class with a problem that should actually be fun to investigate. She calls the problem, "The Biggest Thrill."

To complete the problem, the students work in small groups and fan out across the park to select three specific "thrilling" moments on rides in the park. These moments might come from a single ride, three different rides or any combination of attractions. Students identify these "thrills" and then collect data to calculate and describe the nature of each in physics terms. Does the thrill come from a spinning, centripetal force, or perhaps simply from sudden acceleration? Are there visual factors that contribute to the thrill such as a sudden view of a large hill prior to plummeting down that hill? In addition to the data collected with Physics Gizmo, students collect photographs and video using their smartphones.

Upon their return to the classroom, each team turns to the free graphing program GeoGebra to analyze and describe their three events and then select the "thrill" that they believe, and the data support, is the most thrilling. In order to allow for the assessment of this project, teams of students are required to create two products. The first is a brief scientific "paper" that will display their data and report their findings for each of the three "thrills." This will be created on the classroom laptops using GeoGebra and a word processor. Each student will serve as the primary author for one of the three "thrills" that the team has selected. Second, the team works together to create a visual version of the report for the class. This version includes the content of each of the papers supplemented with the photographs and videos taken at the park. Both versions of the report are added to both their group and individual ePortfolios. These are stored in the open source portfolio management system, Mahara where they can be accessed and viewed by all in the school community.

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