In my first class, every group saw the word cards as “categories” that the other cards should be sorted into.
Students opened the binder clips and start spreading the cards out on the table. Arrange them in a way that makes the most sense.” The instructions for the activity were simply, “Here are some cards. The amount of cards seemed like a lot (to the students) when they first examined them, but it was manageable, fit on their tables, and took a reasonable amount of time. The 3 pages seemed to have the right total number of cards. Having balanced and unbalanced forces as descriptions helped make connections with acceleration during later discussions and connected the work we are doing now to everything else we have done so far this year. The original activity didn’t ask students to do a written description of the motion, so adding in the word cards helped connect students to even more representations. All of them were great solutions, and having so many blank cards made it feel low stakes to try something when they had an idea./ Some made the “missing” x-t and v-t graphs for the cards that didn’t have matches. Some made extra copies of the words to make the grouping fit their concept. Some groups used them for making extra acceleration-time graphs. Having 6 blank cards is a lot, and I wanted to keep the options open for how they would be used.
That helped make the “solution” to the card sort more ambiguous and prompted some use of the blank cards. Some of the v-t and x-t graphs don’t have any matches with other graphs. Some of the graphs showed multi-part motion, adding in some of the complexity of the original activity. It also helped bring up the idea of not being able to tell the starting position from a v-t graph, objects not being at 0 m at 0 s, and positive/negative direction versus positive/negative position. There are multiple x-t graphs showing the same motion, so groups would realize that this wasn’t a pairing activity after a while. I hoped to prompt conversations about the meaning of the acceleration and especially the sign of the acceleration, and that did happen in most (maybe all-I couldn’t hear all of the conversations at once) groups. I only included 2 acceleration-time graphs. Here’s a pile of the cards from all of my groups. (If I had easy access to a laminator, I would have laminated the cards that aren’t blank for easier re-use in the future.) I copied a set for each group, cut them out, and clipped one group’s cards together with a small binder clip. I copied these pages onto card stock paper so they would hold up through at least a few days of use. I made the graphs using GraphSketcher.Īnd here are those pages as a Google Doc that you can copy to your own drive and then edit yourself. The blank cards are intentional (see below). Here are the pages that I used to make the cards. I decided to make the stacks of curves activity into a card sort so that students could immediately jump into the discussion instead of having to generate the graphs themselves first.
#Unit 3 stacks of kinematics curves how to
So in my redesign of the Physics 10 course, I wondered about how to streamline the activity and activate the most value for the most students as early as possible. Completing the page only helps a few students while the discussion helps many, many more students. It takes a while to get through, and it’s pretty challenging. It’s a great activity with great discussion. Here’s a screenshot sample of my old page that I hope will me into the minimum amount of trouble. It’s two pages long and has students translate 16 different sets of graphs (8 starting with x-t graphs and 8 starting with v-t graphs). I updated it a bit with new graphs and to add in some questions about forces since I’ve moved Balanced Forces ahead of Constant Acceleration. The Modeling Instruction canon materials have a worksheet that asks students to translate kinematics graphs into other representations. What are you talking about with these Stacks of Kinematics Curves? First up: the kinematics stacks of curves.
#Unit 3 stacks of kinematics curves update
I will try to update this blog with each of the new activities and changes as I have time. It is the first year we are teaching a yearlong physics class to everyone (10th graders) in my school as the result of a big curriculum redesign in science, and the first time back to teaching a course like this in a few years for me. I’ve been making major updates and changes to my materials in the intro physics course this year.
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