What a huge day for the section of Physics! that met this morning! We came up with a big idea (Newton’s 1st Law, or as we like to call it, Brenna’s Law). In fact, it was the earliest in the conversation I’ve ever had a student pick out the pattern, and it happened so naturally and without prompting. When we got to our 3rd snapshot (the 4th one in the photo, because the 1st was added later), she simply said, “Oh, it’s not balanced. So it’s not going to be a constant velocity.” Wow!
We put together a couple extra snapshots to verify the pattern she found. They wanted to know about me pulling the hover disc when it was turned off. What if I wanted it to speed up, still? Then I would have to pull harder, the tension force would have to be larger, and it would be unbalanced again. They were sold.
You could even really tell how sold they were in our first whiteboard face-off on the pushing-a-box set of problems. None of them had the correct velocity graph at first, but my small, quiet class reasoned their way through with almost no input from me and figured out what it should look like. We ran out of time just as they were starting to settle on the answer, so we’ll pick it back up in a board meeting on Saturday morning.
O'Shea Physics 180 