I only saw the eighth graders twice this week (as we're on an every-other day schedule), so the first day we introduced the ideas, took notes, and then spent a lot of time on this website exploring the relationship between potential and kinetic energy:
It's a great resource that the kids love as well. There are different ramps, and option to add or take away friction, and a space to make your own ramp. The last option, where we were creating our own ramp, was the best part because we could have a lot of teaching opportunities with that––why something worked or didn't work, why the boy couldn't make it through the loop, why he fell off at the end, etc. At the end of one of my classes there was a little bit of extra time so a couple of kids came up and made ramp options that were ridiculous but fun all the same.
Day 2 was applying what we learned last class to their own roller coasters. The rubric was as follows:
20%: Draw a roller coaster that is neat, colorful, and could actually be built in real life.
40%: Have a Potential/Kinetic/Total Energy graph at four different spots on the roller coaster that accurately represents the energy at that spot. Write a quick sentence explaining what the graph means there.
40%: Write a short paragraph explaining what potential energy is, what kinetic energy is, and how they relate to each other on a roller coaster.
The kids did pretty well with this. I have a few stragglers who aren't done (and one student who is autistic and he's been so focused on getting his roller coaster drawn as awesomely as he can that he hasn't accomplished anything else. *sigh*), but for the most part, I think the kids enjoyed this creative project and I think that for special education they showed good understanding of the concepts. So I give this lesson two thumbs up.
Here are some examples of finished (or near finished) products:
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| On the wall outside. I told the students at the beginning that this would go outside, so they should do there best. They also wrote their paragraph on a separate sheet of paper first, and I helped correct it for spelling and accuracy so that good work was put outside for them to display. When more kids finish I'll put them to the left of these posters. |
