Physics #wcydwt – Indirect Measurement

While cleaning up after robotics class today, I noticed a statics problem involving an object hanging from a couple wires that was poking out from under one of my many piles of papers. We had looked at this question earlier during the week in class. A couple students were out for a volleyball tournament in Beijing, so I wanted to do something hands on and multimedia-esque that the missing students wouldn’t feel too upset about missing, but could somehow still be involved and connected with the class work from today.

I realized that we hadn’t yet used the spring scales during our discussion of forces. My obsession with #wcydwt lately has been on using the novelty of a minimum amount of information to get students to see a problem jump off the page/screen. I also wanted the students in class to get the joy of holding back information from their classmates to see if they could figure out the missing info. Lastly, I wanted there to be a simple physics problem that would serve to assess whether all of the students understood how to solve a 2D equilibrium problem.

So I grabbed the spring scales, some string, slotted weights, and told the students to put together a few pictures using these materials. We briefly discussed what information could be given, and what they wanted to leave out for the athletes to figure out on their own. I admit – I pushed them along, and given more time I would have given them more choice, but I don’t think my selfishness and excitement in doing this was too much. The other factor – the vice principal had given us an extra pizza to share – they were also really pushing for efficiency. It wasn’t all me.

And thus the spring scale picture project was born, thanks to one student’s iPhone and Geogebra:

The complete link of the assignment is at http://wiki.hischina.org/groups/gealgerobophysiculus/wiki/e495b/Unit_2__Spring_Scale_Challenge.html.

I’m sure I am not the first to do this, but it was so simple to execute that I had to give it a shot, and I am sharing it because I’m trying to share everything I can these days. We will see what happens when the results come in next week.