General suggestions/questions/comments

[admin]

We have provided opportunities below to comment on the What Do You Think or the For You to Do or the Physics Talk.  If that level of organization is not suitable for you for comments, then please use this thread.  Do you have any general suggestions/questions/comments that you would like to make about this Activity?

[Judy Scheffler]

When we did this lab, students had a tendency to walk too slowly.  Be sure to remind the students to begin pulling the tape quickly before turning on the ticker.

[Becky Reynolds]

You can also have students discard the first part of the tape so they get better data.

[Jeff Briggs]

  Make sure the students mark the tape  before cutting it into 0.1s segments.  If they're not careful, they will mark and cut the segments without marking and simply put them into an order according to their perceived ideas which may not be the correct result. 

  I like to have them mark the segments as 1, 2 3... from the beginning of the tape.

[Sushma Sharma]

You can also have students discard the first part of the tape so they get better data.

Becky
It works better if student move fast and have a given amount of tape as to the whole roll
sushma

[Dan Wood]

We have provided opportunities below to comment on the What Do You Think or the For You to Do or the Physics Talk.  If that level of organization is not suitable for you for comments, then please use this thread.  Do you have any general suggestions/questions/comments that you would like to make about this Activity?

Everyone, on page 20, of the field-test version, there is a typo, the answer to the acceleration problem should be 5 km/hr/s, not 50 km/hr/s.

[Sushma Sharma]

My students loved Timer activity but by the end of day some timer stopped making dots on the paper as the screw on the ticker stared getting loose.
FYTD
Step three is too long I think breaking it into small paragraphs would help.
 Also while making the tape their hand start moving first, as a result in the first half tape they record hand’s motion.
In Step 5 tape’s length is about 1-2 m as they first move fast and then slow down its not clear from which part of the tape they cut strips and how to calculate time if 6 strips are not adjacent. 
Physics to go
Question 3 and 4 are excellent.

[Donna Wolz]

My classes never did get the ticker tape timers to work. I think it was because of the poor quality of the electric outlets in the room. No matter what electric object gets plugged in, the cord can't even be jiggled a teeny, tiny bit or it doen't work. Some of the timers were really humming & some were barely doing anything. Any suggestions on what I could replace the timers with? Don't suggest getting the room rewired or some such. I can assure you it won't happen.

[Kristie Reighard]

We finally got started and my students really liked this lab and comprehended the content. We drew a representation of each graph on the board and walked through the Physics talked and compared the graphs to the problems. Students understood the difference between positive and negative acceleration, positive and negative slope of the graph and how all of that relates to the mathematical answer from an equation. Students left feeling like they put all the ideas together. My new ticker tape timers worked wonderful compared to the ancient ones that I had been using.