Potential Energy

This is an oldie that I made for my kids during our December Energy unit.  It's a potential energy vs. kinetic energy experiment that involves a marble, a ramp, a timer.  Kids see if the speed of the marble (kinetic energy) will change if you vary the height from which the marble is released (potential energy).

The kids had fun with this.  My kids had trouble with calculating the speed, so I had to walk them through that.  But I like this because it incorporates their scientific understanding, their math skills, and their writing abilities in one.

This was before I started our Hypothesis and Conclusion writing unit (it was mostly from this experiment––plus a few others before––that convinced me that backing up and learning how to write scientific hypotheses and conclusions was important!).

Click below for the lab page.