Wednesday, 25 January 2017
We started kinematics yesterday. I gave students a tumble buggy, a meter stick, and told them to take their phones with them. I asked them to describe the buggy’s motion in words, in a data table, on a graph, and with an equation.
Today, I asked if they were confident in yesterday’s work. “Yes!” they said. So I asked them to go head to head, predicting the collision point. Here’s one group’s collison:
Most solved by figuring out the position of each buggy at 1s, then 2s, then 3s, then realized buggies would crash between 3 and 4 seconds, so they guessed the rest of the way.
One group decided to solve in the more elegant way — by solving a system of equations. Finally, we all discussed why our predictions weren’t perfect.
We had a great two days back and I’m eager to introduce them to accelerated motion.
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