I think last week is the first time I missed a post on this blog. The end of my grad school semester plus the usual challenges of the Thanksgiving to winter break stretch got the best of me.

Physics: Unbalanced Forces

Last week, we did a paradigm lab for unbalanced forces. I was really dreading the classic half-Atwood machine, so tried a lab Kelly O’Shea suggested. We set up a ramp, then used a string to connect a cart to a force sensor. Next, I cut the string and students observed that the cart accelerated down the ramp. Students were able to reason out that the tension in the string before it was cut must match how unbalanced the forces on the cart are after the string is cut. Students also were quick to recognize that we could change the tension in the string by changing the angle of the ramp. Students then went and collected data to find a relationship between the size of the unbalanced force and the acceleration of the cart. Compared to the half-Atwood, students had a much clearer conceptual understanding of the lab and the data was much cleaner, so I will be sticking with this approach.

This week, we introduced problems by starting with a card sort where students matched a situation to the motion map, free-body diagram, and vector addition diagram. The acceleration arrows on the motion maps seemed to help students with thinking about the direction of the net force, though a lot of students needed some prompting to use the motion maps. I think that is because they haven’t been a very meaningful sensemaking tool in my class before now. If I want students to be ready to use them with unbalanced forces, I need to give some thought to how I’m going to push students to make meaning from motion maps when they are first introduced.

AP Physics 1: Conservation of Momentum & LOL Diagrams

Last week, we worked on conservation of momentum. I introduced momentum bar charts so we could do some problems from the College Board’s AP Physics 1 workbook. They seemed to really help students, so I wish I’d introduced them much earlier. Students ended up not making much connection between the problems we’d done earlier and the momentum bar charts, so I think I needed to introduce the bar charts right off the bat. The quiz didn’t go as well as I would have liked, but next week’s quiz will include a retake. I’m thinking about what I want to build into class next week as a way to address the gaps I saw on the quiz.

This week, we’ve been focused on energy bar charts and LOL diagrams. We did a lab I’ve done in the past where students raise a cart to the same height above the table using ramps of different angles to see the force vs. distance graph always has the same area. After that, I defined the major forms of energy we’ll be dealing with and students practiced drawing energy bar charts, including for situations where they switch between systems. These are coming really easily to my students and we had some great discussions using mistakes whiteboarding on some bar chart problems. The big challenge will be helping my students revisit these ideas after break.