making a spring scale was cool

[Becky Reynolds]

I thought this activity went well. My students had trouble finding the spring constant from the graph because in their Algebra classes they always find the slope of a line that has no meaning. Its just a line. They wanted to give their answers in fractions and instead of doing the function of dividing rise by run they would count up and over to get the fraction. Well that works fine if the graph is set up in intervals of ones, but that was not the case with our data. It was interesting to see their approach and response when the slope really meant something. Part C was neat because after they finished, they understood how a spring scale works.

I am attaching a very simple quiz that I gave after this activity.