Michael’s Velocity Graph

Shoving aside yesterday’s terrible day of no one finishing their test AND everyone doing horribly on it, today’s problem was a lot of fun to work on.

Each pair got a small white board and marker. They drew their axes (Quad 1 & 4) with time vs. velocity. I then showed them the slide, explaining that the purple was just a number line and they had to graph Michael’s velocity.

I used a picture of MJ because of his famous moonwalk. The kids had kept saying “the particle moves backwards” on their responses so I wanted to see if they really knew what they were saying. Did they mean the particle was moving in the negative direction or doing the moonwalk?

This was just a simple slide show of MJ sliding across the number line, until about 5 seconds in, when the picture flips and he continues sliding to the right, but backwards.

Sure enough, I got graphs that looked like a sine curve instead of two hills. Mostly though, I got the graph of time vs x(t). Guess I’ve got more work cut out for me than I thought.

The actual powerpoint slide show is in the Box widget to the right. Included are some slides that my students had a hard time with a couple of tests ago in terms of reading velocity graphs.