Review for:Kinetic Books: Force and Newton's Laws - Helicopters in flight: Applying Newton's force laws

posted: on January 10, 2007 at 8:23AM

Physics

Newton's Laws of Motion

For students to be able to visualize the concepts we have been talking about and doing problems on. I find the concepts can be esoteric without some hands on work.

Honors or Advanced, Intro or Regular

Students used the virtual lab as a lab. I had them run the simulations and answer the questions in the lab. I presented no modifications.

Provides visualization or animation, Increases graphing skills, Provides a virtual lab, Provides practice or tutorial, Provides additional content, Provides assessment opportunity, Increases student engagement and motivation

As a lab, the Helicopter lab is pretty good. It forces the students to take the time to read directions, analyze the motion, apply formulas, and solve the problem. Give the range of variables, it's difficult for them to simply "guess and check" with this lab. The students are engaged and seemed to have a good grasp of the concepts. I used the lab as a review before a test.

I do have a few basic problems with the Kinetic Books in general. The students are supposed to be able to type their answers into the lab itself and then it is supposed to save them until they finish. Unfortunately, this doesn't work (it might be the way our networks are configured); so the students need to jump back and forth to Word. Also, given the Java applets used, Word, the browser window and the relative age of our computers, the programs will lock up and students will need to start over (worse if they haven't saved recently).

As for just the simulation, the only areas I find difficult or challenging for the students are those dealing with air resistance and the last optional simulation. In the air resistance simulation, the students are supposed have the helicopter move horizontally until the acceleration is zero, then record the force. In reality, the simulation reads a zero acceleration while the velocity is still changing. They need to wait a while after a=0 to finally get a reading with no acceleration. They tend to be impatient and not willing to wait long enough. They also have difficulty seeing the shape of the graph of force vs. velocity (it's supposed to be parabolic).

In the last simulation, the students (and me) have a great deal of difficulty solving it. It is much more complex than the previous simulations and most of my higher level kids hit a wall on it. They can't work out all the forces. It is a little frustrating.