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This activity is one for which you can find a lot of different explanations on the internet, but most of them are wrong. Some say that the soap is ejected from the back of the boat. Others say that water is ejected from the back of the boat. Still ot...
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This activity will help students see that a low center of mass helps objects balance. This is important engineering in car and motorcycle racing and robotics. This activity is inquiry in that students would probably predict that you could not get one...
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This activity is inquiry because students have likely never used this method for determining center of mass. The activity is also useful when building soda bottle rockets for estimating the center of pressure. Students can make a cardboard cutout of ...
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This lab is an inquiry activity if it is done before the discussion of how center of mass and balance are related. However, students should have an idea of what center of mass is before they start the lab. Students should see that when the center of ...
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This inquiry activity should be completed before students have learned about spring constants. It should be pointed out to students that if a rubber band or spring is stretched too much, the spring constant is not constant. Graphs will vary based on ...
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Although this would not be considered a standard lab, it does help students with projects and other labs that involve the combinations of springs or rubber bands. Even if the activity is not used elsewhere, it allows students one more chance to pract...
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This activity is inquiry because students should not yet know the equation for centripetal force. Although they will not exactly derive the equation from this lab, they will determine that there is a direct relationship between force, mass, and veloc...
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This lab is not an inquiry activity but will help students understand the meaning of average velocity. Students do not easily understand from a textbook that an object’s velocity changes over a period of acceleration. They have difficulty understan...
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This activity is inquiry because students have not yet been exposed to the idea of gravitational potential energy being converted into kinetic energy. Students should be able to measure this by performing this activity. They will compare the velocity...
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Teachers may want to show students a completed soda can vehicle because the written instructions can be difficult to follow for some students. These cans can travel a long distance (an entire school hallway is possible). Soda cans may have sharp edge...
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In this lab, students will use a little background information about Bernoulli’s principle to figure out how the spinning of a moving ball affects its trajectory. The activity is inquiry in that students will be discovering this relationship on the...
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In this lab, students will see that for any object that sinks, the object displaces more water when it is floating than when it is submerged. This lab is inquiry in that students do not know the answer to the question before they begin. The teacher c...
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This activity is inquiry in that the students do not know the answer to the question before they begin. Students will use the calibrated rubber band that they created in Lab 27: Spring Constants. They will see that an object is lighter when submerged...
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This activity is inquiry in that students do not know the answer before they begin. If you were to poll the class before doing this activity, you would probably find that the hypotheses are split down the middle of the class....
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In learning how this apparatus works, students will improve their understanding of action/reaction. This knowledge will also help students understand how a rocket engine works and many other important phenomena. Just as the exhaust coming from the re...