I’ve decided to have students in my AP Physics classes do an independent 1st semester project this year. Part of the impetus with this comes from the semester projects that we did in PreAP last year, which many students liked and I felt added value to the course. My goals for this project are for students to ask a question that can be answered by analyzing the video of something moving “in the real world” and then analyzing the video and applying physics concepts and relationships to find the answer. There are lots of types of questions that could be explored; I will be asking students to ask and answer some sort of a “how much?” question. I did the project this summer myself, using a drone to help me answer “How much force is generated to cause a Wiffle Ball to curve (when thrown by a regular dad like me)? How does this compare to the weight of the Wiffle ball?” Students will publish a description of their experiment with a poster, website, or YouTube video. I created a website to document mine. Check it out!
Randall Physics 