When can we neglect air resistance?

This was supposed to be the shortest part of a warm up activity. It turned into a long discussion that revealed a lot of student misunderstandings.

The question was about whether we could ignore air resistance on a textbook being thrown in the air. We spent most of our time discussing the differences and similarities between the three items here:
IMG_0650

There were interesting comments about what factors influence the magnitude of air resistance. I was definitely leading the conversation, but it wasn’t until a student mentioned acceleration that anyone was able to precisely explain why one fell differently from another. We eventually settled on making a comparison between gravity force and air resistance force and calculating acceleration to see how close it was to the acceleration of gravity.

1 thought on “When can we neglect air resistance?

  1. One of my favorite questions. I was modeling field goals with a placekicker preservice teacher and we had to really work to get a realistic simulation. Tough to model without solving the differential equations, too.

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