Science Methods II - Week 1

 

Big Question:

In Lab this week, we tackled the question of, “How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?” We worked together in groups to brainstorm how we can use playground equipment to safely teach about our physics topic of Motion. We discussed using swings, slides, races, and surfaces and read our examples aloud. We then moved onto the question of “How can we ensure that a race is exciting?”. We discussed taking racers competing differently, and creating variables to ensure the race was exciting every time. We worked in our groups and individually came up with our races. Our race involved one person walking normally, and one person walking with their eyes closed. We created a race distance of five meters, and timed the pace of the walker to establish a benchmark. Using our benchmark, we had the person with their eyes closed start exactly one second before the person with their eyes opened. We then ran the race with these variables, and the person with their eyes closed won by about three-tenths of a second, so our race was exciting.

 

Thursday’s Lecture:

In lecture, we discussed what kids should know regarding the SEP’s, DCI’s, and CC’s about learning motion. We then solved a problem where the solution allowed for two racers to finish at the same time, despite running at separate speeds. We then did the same math, but with using a bike and a car, and different units of speed. We discussed that speed is distance over time, and graphed our problem from earlier.

I learned that kids should describe motion through designing investigations and identifying patterns. They need to use standard units relevant to their real lives, and they need to understand that measuring the position and motion of an object will let them predict where it will be in the future.

 

Textbook reading:

From the textbook I learned that describing position requires both a reference, and a distance. I also learned about scalar and vector quantities, and that scalar only tells one statistic, bit vector gives two. I also learned that acceleration describes how fast velocity changes, not speed.

The most helpful part of the chapter was that position required a reference, and velocity measures the change in speed of a position.

I could use more information on scalar and vector quantities as those are still words I am unfamiliar with, the rest of the chapter makes sense and I understand it well.

I have no questions for this chapter, although I would care to comment that it would be helpful if more conversions between imperial and metric were taught, as those can be very helpful for anyone interest in doing any calculations outside of the United States, for example calculating speeds of vehicles from kph to mph, or areas of rooms from square meters to square feet.