Welcome back to the Science of Golf! U.S. Open play is underway at Pinehurst No.2 in central North Carolina! This year’s Science of Golf series reunites NBC Learn with the United States Golf Association (USGA) and Chevron to bring you the science, technology, engineering, and math behind the sport. And once again, NSTA has developed lesson plans to help you build on the videos as you carry out STEM initiatives in your middle- and high-school science courses.
Ten new videos have been added to those from 2013. They cover new areas as well as provide a new take on others. Check out Science of Golf: Torque and Moment of Inertia. In it, LPGA golfer Belen Mozo demonstrates what she does to “smash it.” Use the video as a springboard for student investigations into these concepts. The lesson plan provides you with ideas and guidance on how to get started. This particular one will probably work best in middle- and high-school classrooms. But you teach elementary? No worries! Several have concepts and possible investigations that will easily adapt to grades 4–6.
The videos are available cost-free on www.NBCLearn.com. NSTA will also highlight each video in the series in this blog over the next several days. Use them as your school year winds down to continue instruction after final grades are posted. When you do, please leave comments below each posting about how well the information worked in real-world classrooms. And if you had to make significant changes to a lesson, we’d love to see what you did differently, as well as why you made the changes. Leave a comment, and we’ll get in touch with you with submission information.
Video
SOG: Torque and Moment of Inertia discusses the major impact that both torque and moment of inertia can have on the motion of the golf ball and the game of golf.
STEM Lesson Plan—Adaptable for Grades 7–12
SOG: Torque and Moment of Inertia describes how students might design a solution to a problem about moment of inertia. It also provides ideas for STEM exploration plus strategies to support students in their own quest for answers and as well as a more focused approach that helps all students participate in hands-on inquiry.
Image of Pinehurst Course No.2, courtesy of Mike Renlund.
You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans: [contact-form 2 “ChemNow]