New semester in motion

It’s day one of the second semester in the high school.

That means the  start of new high school courses.  Here we are at the first meeting of Physics of Motion.

The first experimental challenge:  Find the relationship between the distance a ball runs down an incline and the time it takes to roll. Students are looking for patterns by graphing so they needed enough distance/ time points to make a recognizable curve.  The class talked about the advantage of  averaging multiple trials and of having larger times so that the reaction time of the person on the stop watch was minimized.Students made the decisions on each of these points as they designed the experiments.

Here they are at work in groups this morning – using the incline of the staircase in Kenyon as their laboratory.