TJ Comisky, Science Teacher, High School
In physics, students are tasked with completing tasks by thinking and acting like scientists do in a real-world setting. One way students do this is through teamwork and collaboration. This week in class, students were grouped together and asked to create their own procedure to determine how the speed of a cart rolling down a ramp can be predicted by determining its gravitational potential energy.
After gathering results, students calculate energies on whiteboards, providing them space to detail their thoughts, show calculations, and provide feedback to each other. Students can formulate hypotheses, analyze results, and compare how their initial ideas are supported or refuted by their actual results. In their latest exploration, students took turns measuring heights, controlling the cart, performing calculations, and running computer software to predict and measure their cart’s speed at the bottom of a ramp when the cart has different masses loaded onto the cart.
This graph, collected by Kierstyn Wacek, Peter Rashidi, and Mayson Mitchell, shows the maximum speed of a cart will always remain constant even if the mass of the cart changes.