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I was simply wondering if anyone had some fresh ideas for labs in a high school physics classrooms. We are all familiar with the tried and true egg drop experiment, but I was looking for something new to use in the classroom.
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Hi Michael,
Building mousetrap cars or rubber-band powered cars and having them race up or down a ramp are fun, stem-oriented, and instructional. Some good engineering possibilities, too. Recording data about how the vehicles run is enhanced if you have access to motion sensors or photogates, too. Many teachers use these types of motion labs so let's encourage them to chime in with their ideas and perhaps share some of their lessons:}
come-back vehicles may also be of interest for a less involved building project - there may be sample lessons in past journal articles available in the LC on this and other types of vehicular competitions or projects.
~patty
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To put a 21st century spin on your motion labs, you can also include video analysis of motion and even computer modeling of motion. The open source Tracker software will allow you to create position-time and velocity-time graphs from your videos of motion. Its available here: http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/
You could start with constant velocity motion (ball rolling across table) and then move to accelerated motion (free fall objects) with negligible drag (ball) and drag (folded newspaper) and then move to projectile motion.
Some of the NASA projects work well in physics as well. I use "The Great Boomerang Challenge" as my final physics project. We have the contest for the best boomerang on the senior's last day (most of my physics students are seniors). I will be doing the NASA On Target project as well. There's information on the NASA Explorer Schools website of these kinds of projects.
More traditional projects are a bridge building contest (they'll have "budgetary" (material) constraints and we'll determine which bridges hold the most weight). We also do an egg drop.
We use the K'NEX Roller Coaster Education kit in my classes for a number of projects. They're finishing their first, which was to build the roller coaster design, create a three-dimensional coordinate system and take measurements at selected points around the track. They then had to calculate the distance between sequential points and the total distance around the track (which would be compared to my measurement of the same). They also had to create a profile graph of the roller coaster (height vs. position) and put all their data in a specification report. Finally, they created a design for their idea of the ultimate roller coaster and presented their data and ultimate roller coaster design to the class.
Later this semester they'll be building an incline plane using the K'Nex and design a set of experiments to determine which variables affect motion down the incline plane (mass ball, angle of incline, etc.) They will use photogates (Vernier) to get accurate times of flight. They can also use video analysis. Their third project will be projectile motion on a half-pipe model using the same kit. Their final project using the K'NEX kit will involve collisions and conservation of momentum.
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I do a great lab using eggs for change of momentum and impulse. The kids love it and they actually start to understand that if you increase the stopping time, the stopping force decreases.
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It is always fun to scan the resources in the Learning Center and to put some of them together in collections and then to share these collections with colleagues.
I'm going to attach a traditional one on forces and motion and then another on flight since it offers additional ideas for thinking about motion activities. It is fun to build balloon powered objects to rise above the earth and to study their motion as well as to fly kites.
If anything strikes your fancy - as in, hmmm...perhaps we can turn this into a neat inquiry lab, give a shout. The more voices the merrier.
Flight- gliders, planes, balloons Collection
(8 items)
Forces and Motion: High School Focus Collection
(10 items)
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Another resource to consider is NASA Explorer Schools. It is free to join/apply. They offer fantastic resources. Tonight, I attended a web seminar on Lunar Nautics and Newton's Laws of Motion. It uses the laws of motion to explain the landing of Mars rovers. Also, it has an activity on creating your own balloon rocket with "staging," a centripetal force lab, and a lunar landing egg drop.
If you ever get the chance to attend one of these webseminars, I highly recommend it! Real- world applications, engineering, STEM all bundled together with a nice NASA bow!
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