AP Physics 1: Kinetic Energy Board Meeting

I am being compensated by Pivot Interactives as part of their Chemistry Fellows program.

Students whiteboarded their results from this week’s Pivot Interactives activity with a puck on a ramp to get to a definition for kinetic energy. I definitely wish I’d done energy bar charts prior to this lab, but conservation of energy is emphasized enough across our science curriculum that it wasn’t too big of a leap for students to recognize the energy transformation happening. Students were really pleased when they realized their slope worked out to equal 1/(2g), which is exactly what the formulas predict.

Physics: Momentum Representations

Students worked on representing momentum transfer using sketches, bar charts, and velocity vs. time graphs. The use of velocity vs. time graphs was influenced by Brian Frank’s work on momentum representations, and I really like the way it connects momentum to tools we’ve used earlier in the year. I’ve got one section with 30 students and one section with 8, and I’m quickly figuring out I need to be conscious about hanging back in my small class to encourage them to talk to each other about the problems before they talk to me.

Chemistry Essentials: Density

Students worked on finding a relationship between the mass and volume of water. Today really stretched my students since I had them design their own experiment and we started a board meeting on the lab, but students rose to the challenge. I’ve been having them use fill int he blank “for every” statements to talk about their slope, and that has been a big help for students to get a conceptual understanding of what their slope means. Yesterday, we had to pause the board meeting to define what the intercept of a graph is, so I got really excited when students not only brought up that groups had intercepts of either 0 g or 10 g, but came up with the idea that the intercept came down to whether groups hit tare after putting their graduated cylinder on the balance.