We did the Whiteboarding Mistakes Game today. The EQ today was “does negative acceleration always mean slowing down?” and the goal of the worksheet was to start with our operational definitions of velocity and acceleration (v is slope of x vs. t graph, a is slope of v vs. t graph) to develop new rules about how the directions of v and a must compare if an object is either speeding up or slowing down. Students were generally pretty excited about intentionally planting one mistake on their whiteboard, but it was also harder than I had anticipated for team to come up with a “good” mistake. (I got some good laughs when I used Kelly O’Shea’s line about making as many unintentional mistakes as they would like.) We didn’t finish the discussion today. I am interested to see how well we are able to focus on the theme of the worksheet while also doing the “mistakes” part of it.
Randall Physics 