I chose the ‘Designing an Amusement Park’ graphing challenge as I have fond memories of riding the roller coasters with my dad when I was a kid. Roller coasters are an excellent way to help students connect concepts of physics with an experience that they are familiar with, ie/ making physics accessible, which is a main tenet of WISE (Linn, 2003). This inquiry project tries to connect graphing interpretation with concepts of motion. I would customize this activity to help teach students how to interpret graphs in a G6-8 physics classroom.
This activity starts out trying to connect speed/motion with rollercoaster thrill vs. safety. I believe this is trying to get students to activate their prior knowledge around motion, but again the link is tenuous and I am not sure that students (g6-8) would see the connection. As this lesson is supposed to be about graph interpretation I would likely want to adjust this to include some sample graphs that students can try to interpret. This lesson adds a secondary component around designing for safety vs. thrill, perhaps as a way to make concept of speed accessible, but they don’t really make that connection so I would improve this so that students are more likely to connect the dots. I would provide embedded links about motion and speed and the effects on the human body. By doing this I would be helping to provide more of a scaffold to help engage knowledge integration (Linn, 2003).
Students are then taken through the main activity, which is to create graphs that will translate to the action of the roller coaster. Presumably the students should be seeing how the changes in the graph affect the roller coaster speed and direction. However the graph building is difficult and clumsy and the effect it has on the speed/motion of the roller coaster can be difficult to see.
While the central idea of having a simulation translate into a graph to help students understand that a graph relays information (ie/ tells a story) I feel that this would have more impact with a couple minor adjustments:
- Turn the simulation around. Have the students make speed and motion change adjustments to the roller coaster and then have this information build the graph. The screen could show the roller coaster moving and the graph being drawn at the same time. Students can then play around with the roller coaster controls to see how those changes change the shape of the graph.
- Asking some guiding questions will help students to connect the concepts that the graph is showing (ie/ what is the relationship between position on the graph and motion in the car)?
- Provide more embedded links to help students expand their understanding. This aligns with the WISE philosophy of making science accessible. This activity doesn’t give students a chance to expand their understanding.
This lesson does provide students with the opportunity to engage in collaboration and knowledge sharing. Which I thought worked well, although the guiding questions in this area were a tad vague and introduced a new observation (head movement) that students hadn’t been primed to look for or connect with the ideas in this lesson. This piece may have related to the safety questions of this activity – but because there is a long gap between asking students to consider safety and this question of head motion I don’t know if a G6-8 student would grasp the connection.This would be taken care of by the adjustments I listed earlier.
I would expand this lesson to include a more constructivist component by asking students to consider other examples where motion has an effect on the human body and ask them to hypothesize what the graphs would look like. Some examples could be driving in the car with their parents, riding their bike, watching a manned rocket, riding in an airplane, etc. Depending on the scope of the lesson this could transition to a secondary inquiry project that looked at graphs that compared speeds/motions of different vehicles and their effect on the human body.
Resources
Linn, M., Clark, D., & Slotta, J. (2003). Wise design for knowledge integration. Science Education, 87(4), 517-538.
Kari,
You make some great additions to this lesson! I also looked at this one before settling into which one I was going to pick. I think the original authors didn’t have the students interpret graphs, as they wanted to keep it more experimental and observational, however, your additions would make for a much more accessible lesson for many students. The link between how the graph looks and how the coaster moves might be obvious to us, but not necessarily to a 6-8 student.
One way that I think it could be pushed forward even more would be to make the thinking even more visible. For example, students could set the animation moving as they want it, and then try to duplicate that motion through the graph. In that way, everyone watching could see how close they were getting to their desired goal.
Your idea of making the guiding questions more explicit would also help to make the lesson more accessible to the students, meeting another goal of SKI/WISE.
Do you think that this lesson would be engaging for students, or would they be left wanting more connection, like perhaps with a game like Roller Coaster Tycoon? A quick google search found all kinds of roller coaster simulations with physics connections, many of which are equally or more engaging than the one in the model. (http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Physics-Interactives/Work-and-Energy/Roller-Coaster-Model/Roller-Coaster-Model-Interactive , https://www.learner.org/interactives/parkphysics/parkphysics.html , http://www.funderstanding.com/educators/coaster/) While WISE is solid in pedagogy and science, it seems like it has a long way to go in making science interesting and up to date!
Thanks for you post!
-Jonathan-
Hi Jonathan,
Sorry a bit late to respond have been laid up with the flu!
I was trying to think how to make the topic more engaging and the resources you found are great examples. My struggle (and I expect what students will struggle with) is what is this lesson actually teaching. Is it graph interpretation or is it motion? I see that they are combining the two…which is great – but is this a resources for a larger lesson on motion – if that is the case then furthering explorations on roller coasters is a great way to continue to engage students. If this is lesson on graph interpretation (ie/ maybe found in a math course?) then the lesson has to move forward toward data visualization (a much hard ‘area’ to make engaging). What this lesson is really missing is clear LO’s (and ideally tied to CO’s) to help me understand how this activity ties to a bigger lesson.
An ID model that I use frequently is backward design. This is the practice of aligning activities like this to specific LO’s to help teachers and students connect activities with the bigger picture of what they should be ‘understanding’. WISE has some great internal concepts but what I think it is lacking is clear connection to the overall learning goals of a course/week/module/lesson.
Cheers!