Could worms save the world? (If they’re speedy!)
Feel like you need to add a little excitement and real world problem solving in your lessons? A simple answer:
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Force and Motion
The best way to use textbooks: to build ramps
In the experiment, the students roll a marble down the ramp and vary the height of the ramp. The marble will go faster the higher it starts (more kinetic energy coming from more potential energy) but, in a low resources classroom, we don’t have a way to measure the speed of the ball. Fortunately, the faster the ball is going (higher ramp) the farther the ball will push the cup when the ball hits the cup at the end of the ramp. We can use the distance that the cup moves as a substitute for the speed.
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May the (balanced and unbalanced) forces be with you
Physics is Phun, especially when EVERYTHING is possible. If you are not yet familiar with the PhET simulations, prepare to have your world be revolutionized. These little apps are amazing for letting students “tinker” with the world and figure things out on their own, no mess or danger involved. It even better now that PhET has started developing sims in HTML5 instead of JAVA/Flash so the sim runs on any platform (including Chromebooks).
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