Posted on 14 September 2011 at 08:36h

The start of a new term is often quite busy what with all the new students and everything. Maybe not the best time to develop new resources but sometimes you have no choice. This year I discovered that I have 18 students in each of my first year classes and the practical program has apparatus for 16, rather than buying extra equipment I thought it might good incentive to write some new practicals so I've been spending time in the lab with my EE supervisee Said trying out some ideas and collecting data. The result is 3 new kinematics labs:

The rolling ball utilises video analysis in loggerpro to measure the velocity of a ball after it has rolled down an inclined plane leading to a value for g.

The card drop measures g by timing a rectangular card falling through a photo gate.

Angle of a slope investigates the relationship between the angle of a slope and the acceleration of a cart rolling down it, a nice application of vector components and another quite good value for g.

I am not going to use these practicals for assessment so I have written help pages providing instructions on how to analyse data, draw graphs and evaluate results. Hopefully after doing these 3 my students will know what is required of them. I have also prepared exemplar reports to give some ideas about the sort of complexity required in the evaluation to score top marks.

As luck would have it several students have now dropped physics so I didn't have to do all this work after all :-(