What Is a Light Year?
Understanding Unfamiliar Units This activity gets students out of their desks to practice measuring and manipulating units in a fun, interactive manner. Conversion units of distance are often too awkwardly large to manipulate when discussing planets, solar systems, and galaxies. Units such as light-years are useful when discussing enormous distances but are difficult for students […]
The Basics of Graphs and Charts
Help your students brush up on their graphing skills with this quick review. Graphs and charts communicate information visually. They can show patterns, help scientists identify correlations, and get the point of the experiment across quickly. Typically, the independent variable is plotted on the x-axis The dependent variable is plotted on the y-axis. The […]
Webinar: Making Sense of Inheritance Data
Empower students to build an understanding of the importance of sampling size and repeated trials with Wisconsin Fast Plants® crosses using CODAP (Common Online Data Analysis Program). This webinar looks at a new way to let students explore data. We delve into a sample lesson that allows students to examine phenotypic data collected from Wisconsin […]
Gathering, Visualizing, and Interpreting Data
“Data, data, data. I can’t make bricks without clay!” Sherlock Holmes This quote from the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is a perfect analogy for teaching your students about working with data. Data are the raw materials from which scientists draw conclusions and develop theories. Data collection and analysis is a large part of every scientist’s […]
The Conical Pendulum
An Experiment in Circular Motion and Centripetal Acceleration The conical pendulum lab allows students to investigate the physics and mathematics of uniform circular motion. A motorized, plastic plane* is suspended from a thin string and “flies” in a circular path with a constant speed. The plane and the supporting string trace a conical pendulum. Students […]
Very Trendy: Analyzing Data
Students often struggle with how to analyze and present the data they obtain in an experiment. While many schools offer courses in statistics or in computer spreadsheet and graphing applications, these are rarely prerequisites for science courses. In your science class, spend some time discussing data analysis at the beginning of the year to help […]
Derivation of the Kinematics Equation
High school physics courses usually begin with a study of classical mechanics. Early in the course students are introduced to the equations of motion, the kinematics equations. Kinematics Kinematics is the study of the motion of objects without concern for the forces causing the motion. These familiar equations allow students to analyze and predict the […]