BIOSCOPES Summer Institute 2013 - Mechanical Energy | This lesson is designed to be part of a sequence of lessons. It follows resource 52648 "BIOSCOPES Summer Institute 2013 - Forces" and precedes resource 52957 "BIOSCOPES Summer Institute 2013 - Thermal Energy." This lesson uses a predict, observe, and explain approach along with inquiry based activities to enhance student understanding of the conservation of energy. |
Ramp It Up | Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct experiments to test the Law of Conservation of Energy and the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, stopwatches, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies, they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the relationships between mass, velocity, height, gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, and total energy as well as the relationships between mass, velocity, and momentum. |
Riding the Roller Coaster of Success | Students compete with one another to design and build a roller coaster from insulation tubing and tape that will allow a marble to travel from start to finish with the lowest average velocity. In so doing, students learn about differences between distance and displacement, speed and velocity, and potential and kinetic energy. They also examine the Law of Conservation of Energy and concepts related to force and motion. |
SMALL: Shape Memory Alloy Lab | Shape Memory Alloys are metals that can return to or 'remember' their original shape. They are a cutting edge application for Chemistry, Physics, and Integrated Science. The activities in this lesson work well for the study of forces, Newton's Laws, and electricity in physics. They also lend themselves well to crystalline structures, heat of reaction, and bonding in chemistry. In addition, students could study applications for the materials in the medical and space industries. |