AP Physics: Angled Projectile Practical

We wrapped up yesterday’s mistakes game, then started a lab practical. Each group got a different distance from the launcher, and needs to determine how high off the ground to place a hoop so that the projectile will travel through it. Tomorrow, we’ll setup the hoops so students can see the results. In both this practical and the problems we’ve been doing, I’ve found some of my strongest students get stuck. They usually know what they’re doing, but don’t see their way to the answer yet. I need to keep reminding my students that they can play with the pieces, even if they don’t know what the full picture will look like yet. I might look for a good goal-less problem to combine with the practical tomorrow to help push them towards thinking about what else they can do, rather than what the answer must be.

Physical Science: Ohm’s Law

I’ve found I really like having students use PhET’s circuit construction kit before we get out the batteries and bulbs, so today we went to the computer lab to find a relationship between current, voltage, and resistance. I left the directions fairly open so that students would be designing their own experiments. Since I don’t talk much about units in this course, the simulations ammeter felt like a black box to a lot of the students. I was really intrigued by one student who measured current by counting how many blue dots passed a selected point in one minute, which connects really nicely to the definition of current as the flow of electric charge.