This week we wrapped up balanced forces with a practical. I used some magnetic hooks to attach spring scales to the whiteboard and let students measure the forces and any angles they wanted. Even though I only had two setups and five groups, different groups ended up taking different approaches, which was great for students to see in some discussion after the practical. We also had some good discussion about uncertainty when we measured the actual mass and students were initially disappointed with how far their calculations were off before, which lead to the realization they’d actually been pretty on target!

After the practical, we started Newton’s 2nd Law with a paradigm lab using the standard modified Atwood’s machine. There was some messiness in the value of the slope that students got, which is pretty typical from when I’ve done this lab. One of these days I’ll figure out how to coach students to really high-quality results! Students did really well at translating the equations for their line of best fit into something that had units and variables that matched the experiment and did a nice job in the board meeting making sense of their slope and intercept.