Learning Experience

Science Concepts

Learning Activities

Course Introduction

1. Introduction: What Is This Thing Called "Physics"?

Introduction to motion, force, and energy

Students design a Rube Goldberg machine and analyze and ask questions about the principles of physics involved in their machine.

Unit 1: Motion and the Laws of Motion

2. A Perfect Race: Measuring Changes in Motion

Speed, velocity, acceleration

Students design an investigation to determine their own velocity. They work with data to calculate, graph, and compare velocity and acceleration.

3. Physics on the Playground: Measuring Forces

Types of forces, force interactions, Newton's Third Law, Newton's First Law

Students observe a variety of forces and diagram the forces acting on children using playground equipment. Students propose force-measuring devices that could be built in a physics playground.

4. Battle on Heartbreak Hill: Applying Newton’s Laws

Newton's Second Law

Students measure the force exerted on a gravity car and its acceleration, then see if the variables are related. They use what they learned about all of Newton’s laws to analyze race situations and explain why certain strategies can help win races.

Unit 2: Energy and Energy Transformations

5. The Car of the Future: Describing Energy Conversions

Energy as the ability to do work, forms of energy, energy conversion

Students learn about energy forms and conversions and build their own devices to do work. They describe the energy forms and conversions in a gas-powered car and in a hybrid car and create an ad for the hybrid car.

6. As the Paddlewheel Turns: Measuring Energy

Calculating work, potential and kinetic energy

Students design and execute their own experiment to know the relationship among mass, height, and gravitational potential energy.

Unit 3: Energy Transfer

7. Storm Chasers: Feeling the Energy of Electricity

Electric charge, electric forces, electric fields, electrical charging by induction, triboelectric series

Students learn about how lightning occurs. They reproduce lightning on a small scale in the classroom and describe how the movement and buildup of electric charge occurs in their experiment.

8. Ocean Terror: Describing Waves

Waves, medium, propagation, vibration, reflection, refraction, diffraction, constructive interference, destructive interference

Students observe how waves are generated and describe wave interactions. They use their knowledge to predict how ocean waves act when they encounter obstacles.

9. The Hotshots: Identifying Transfers of Heat

Heat, thermal equilibrium, conduction, convection, radiation, specific heat, specific heat equation

Students investigate different types of heat transfer and learn about heat capacity. They use their knowledge to analyze a fire situation.

Course Conclusion

10. The Final Challenge: Build It and They Will Learn

Applying the principles of motion, force, and energy

Students redesign and build their Rube Goldberg machines using criteria based on the principles of physics they have been exploring.

Learning Experience

Science Concepts

Learning Activities

Course Introduction

1. Introduction: Describing Future Inventions

Interdependence of science and technology

Students learn about a technology’s operation, uses, and underlying science concepts. They present these current inventions, then brainstorm and describe future inventions.

Unit 1: Motion in One and Two Dimensions

2. Airdrop in Antarctica: Understanding the Motion of Falling Objects

Gravitational force, weight, law of universal gravitation, terminal velocity, acceleration due to gravity

Students build parachutes and analyze their motion. They use what they learned to provide information to help prepare packages of medicine that will be airdropped.

3. Living Above the Clouds:
Describing the Motion of a Satellite

Vertical velocity, horizontal velocity, vectors

Students analyze projectile motion. With information about the International Space Station’s height and the curve of the earth, students calculate the speed and angle for a launch of a space station part.

4. Crashes and Collisions: Investigating Momentum

Momentum, impulse, momentum-impulse theorem, law of conservation of momentum

Students investigate the variables that affect collisions and study concepts related to momentum. They use what they learned to design a bumper.

Unit 2: Electricity and Magnetism

5. The City of Light: Understanding Electric Circuits

Circuit, circuit components, voltage, current, resistance, series and parallel pathways, Ohm’s Law

Students build different kinds of circuits and analyze energy transfer. They describe and diagram the circuit found in their homes.

6. Power From the Sun: Explaining How a Generator Works

Generators, magnets, magnetic fields, electric fields, electromagnetism, power

Students learn how electricity and magnetism are related and make a small generator. Students use what they learn to explain how a power plant creates electric potential energy.

Unit 3: Sound and Light

7. Do You See What I Hear?: Making Pictures with Sound

Waves, frequency, amplitude, wavelength, wave speed, wave equation, resonance, reflection, wave intensity

Students explore how sound waves travel in different materials and measure the speed of sound in air. They write a proposal to obtain funding to find an undersea object using sonar techniques.

8. It's Not Magic, It's Physics: Illusions with Light

Refraction, reflection, law of reflection, virtual image, color spectrum, subtractive color mixing, additive color mixing, electromagnetic spectrum, wave speed, wave equation

Students investigate refraction, the formation of a virtual image by reflection, and subtractive and additive color mixing. They use what they learned to advise haunted house designers on how to make three kinds of spooky optical illusions.

Unit 4: Thermodynamics

9. Under the Hood: Thermodynamics of Internal Combustion Engines

Heat engine, internal combustion engine, Otto cycle, first law of thermodynamics, second law of thermodynamics, absolute zero, heat pump

Students learn how an internal combustion engine works and study the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They apply their knowledge to explain why car engines need to be cooled.

Course Conclusion

10. The Final Challenge: Explaining Technology

Interdependence of science and technology

Students describe the design of one kind of technology and explain in detail the science that makes that technology work.