Two things to share for today. We are starting a new unit (Momentum). Last year we decided as a district team to move momentum right after constant velocity, instead of waiting for it to the end. The connections with constant velocity, and the simplicity of momentum conservation make it work well as the 2nd unit. I struggled, however, with a story line that I could explain to students. It made sense in my head, but sounded very technical when I tried to tell the story of where we had been and where we were going.
My wife helped me come up with the story line, which is summed up by our Essential Question today, which is “How to objects transfer motion to each other? How can we measure how much motion is transferred?” Describing this in terms of motion makes clear connections to what students have done already. In the coming days, we will discover that it’s not necessarily “motion” that is transferred, but a combination of motion and mass that gets transferred: momentum.
To get students to internalize this and start seeing connections, I started by showing a 1 minute video of “motion” getting transferred, and had students brainstorm, and then later categorize, a list of situations where “motion” is transferred.
Next, students did a pre-lab partner activity to get them to practice analyzing the graphs they will collect in our momentum lab, and to start to think about what factors could cause different outcomes in collisions. Our team had noticed that students had difficulty analyzing these types of graphs in this lab last year. Tony Cacciola had the idea for the pre-lab. Students did a great job discussing and making sense of these graphs, I stationed an “answer key” in the back for them to go check as groups.
Randall Physics 