Middle School Science The Philadelphia School

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Middle School Science The Philadelphia School
Yes, its rocket science
TPS teachers Laura Matheny, Virginia Friedman,
and Steve Bartholomew collaborated with Phil
Nelson (University of Pennsylvania Physics
Department), doing hands-on science with
middle-school students.
At many schools, middle-school science
instruction is based on learning and repeating
poorly understood facts. We preferred to show
children some intrinsically exciting phenomenon,
take some quantitative data, make some graphs,
and ask for their ideas. Then we try to connect
to other phenomena. Above, students launch
bottle-rockets they designed. Right, Nelson
discusses the analysis.
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Middle School Science The Philadelphia School
Yes, its rocket science
We obtained the trajectories by analyzing
individual video frames from movies like the one
above, then graphed the height at each successive
frame. The resulting graph was a parabola,
showing constant acceleration measuring its
curvature gave a surprisingly accurate value for
the acceleration of gravity.
Above, Virginia Friedman discusses the idea of
constant-acceleration motion. Right, a students
graph of height versus time.