Review for:Vernier Motion Sensor

If you used this resource in your own classroom, please add your review.

    

posted: on June 1, 2007 at 9:52AM

My rating of this resource: *****

My experience using this resource:
physics

Topic I was teaching:
uniformly accelerated motion; conservation of energy

My learning goal for which this resource was used:
obtain a good data set for an object in freefall; analyze graphs of position and velocity vs. time to determine value of gavitational acceleration; use data to construct graphs of PE/KE/total mechanical energy and attempt to verify energy conservation

Course Level:
Honors or Advanced, Intro or Regular

How I/my students used the resource:
working in pairs, students used the motion detector and Logger Pro to record data for a soccer ball or basketball that was thrown upward and allowed to fall back toward the detector; data was exported as a text file which students then imported in Excel for graphing and analysis

Value Added:
Increases data collection & analysis skills, Provides assessment opportunity

Strengths:
The data sets are extensive and high quality; learning the software is quick enough that students can easily collect good data in the time available to them

Weaknesses:
motion detectors can produce spurious readings, so it sometimes takes multiple attempts to get good data (on the other hand, that's life in science, so maybe that's not a bad thing...)

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