Published In

The Physics Teacher

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2014

Subjects

Physics -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Activity programs, LabVIEW

Abstract

Educators have found that kinesthetic involvement in an experiment or demonstration can engage students in a powerful way. With that as our goal, we developed three activities that allow students to connect with and quantitatively explore key physics principles from mechanics with three fun physical challenges. By presenting these activities as competitions, we can challenge students to use what they know about the relevant physics to improve their performance and beat their own score or those of other students. Each activity uses an original, real-time data collecting program that offers students and educators a simple, clear method to demonstrate various physics concepts including: (1) impulse momentum, (2) center of mass (COM), and (3) kinematics. The user interface, written in LabVIEW, is intuitive to operate and only requires Vernier Force Plates, a Vernier LabQuest, a webcam, and acomputer. In this article, we will describe each of these activities, all of which are well suited and readily available for other outreach events or classroom demonstrations.

Description

Copyright © 2014 All rights reserved. The Physics Teacher is copyrighted. Individual articles in The Physics Teacher are copyrighted by the society, as indicated on each article.

Original published in The Physics Teacher and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.4902193

DOI

10.1119/1.4902193

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/17828

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