Isabel Sherman: Elementary Science Methods 2024-2025

  The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did. This week in lab we touched on swings, and why you need to push a child to keep going back and forth on the swing. We looked at the pendulum simulation and played around with that, then zooming into that with an energy lens the pendulum slows down because it collides with air particles, speeding them up and slowing the pendulum down. The collisions transfer from the pendulum to the air. You need to keep pushing a child on a swing to keep them going due to the collisions with air particles (which transfer energy from the rider to the surrounding air), and pushing transfers energy back to the rider as they speed up. We revisited our big question for the module- “how can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?”, and looked at the different physics concepts related to types of play. Races and describing motion, slides and the force lens, swings and force and energy lenses, and then surfaces with a force...

    The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did. This week's big question addressed in lab was “What affects how long it takes a swing to go back and forth?”. But, before answering that question, we re-visited our question from last week's lab “what affects a rider’s speed down a slide?”.  We looked at why slide height matters again, and learned that riders accelerate as they slide down a slide, so, the higher the slide the more time a rider has to speed up. We talked about the importance of steepness, and surface as well. We reviewed friction and practiced drawing forces on a slide. Then we talked about “why things fall”. Many of us were surprised to see that the tennis ball and paper ball that was tighter fell at the same speed. Before being a tight crunched ball we saw that the tennis ball fell faster. This was due, in part to air drag. Then we moved back into why rider weight doesn't matter. Then, we got to work on investigating swings! We des...

  The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did. During lab, the big question in lab was “What affects a rider’s speed down a slide?”, this is an extension of the physics module question, “How can we support play that is exciting but no dangerous?”. In class we investigated slides! First, we talked about some variables to test such as fabric type, slide steepness, and rider weight. My group decided to test the rider weight. Using a car, we weighed it down and did three trials of each car. We wrote out our investigation on the white board. We had hypothesized that the heavier the car the faster it would go. However, the time averages were so close together that we determined that the rider weight was not a huge factor. We went around the class and each group shared what they did.  A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture. In lecture we talked more about slides, and we talked more about the variables that groups investigated and the affe...

 *Note* I could not find my pictures from this lab:( But my group and I went to the bottom of the stairs in Lindquist north! So I have added the pressbook picture:) The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. How do we make a race exciting between people who run at different speeds? In the lab this week we worked on ways that we could ensure that a race is exciting. After finding a place in Lindquist my group worked on ways we could make a race exciting. Initially we thought we would pick both methods of racing (long jumping and walking toe to toe) when we went against a group. Then, we realized we just needed to do one type of race, and figure out how many meters per second Claire was going. We then went head to head (or toe to toe?) with another group who was walking slowly. We took what our time was and their time was and decided who should go first, to make the race exciting.  A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture. We rev...