The Class Designs The Deployment Experiment

The video above shows the recent deployment activity where students predicted the vertical position of a projectile (a Hot Wheels car) as it traversed a known horizontal distance. The student predictions are identified by green sticky notes on the the left hand side.

The students first had to work out the problem on their own whiteboards before being given the sticky note that indicated the vertical position as measured above or below the red line. Most groups calculated the same position with two groups noting a sightly different prediction!

In this deployment, I set up the ramp, and told them that they had a photogate sensor at their disposal. They had to design the experimental procedure. A great discussion followed, and the class was quite successful as you can see (the students who had the significantly different prediction were able to hunt down their mistake – so everyone felt that the model “worked”).

Analyzing Projectile Motion in Video and Code

Prior to the deployment, students were asked to use a video camera to record the motion of a projectile. This is a great experiment to do with LoggerPro or some other video analysis tools that allow the students to track the position of the ball or some other projectile.

The students have also been learning how to simulate constant velocity and constant acceleration particle motion in Processing. We extended this to now include projectile motion, and the students analyzed simulated projectiles and compared the data gathered in the real universe to that gathered in the virtual universe. I will be writing about this process in more detail soon.