Review for:Kinetic Books: Virtuala Physics Labs: Navigating race tracks

posted: on April 2, 2007 at 9:55AM

Physics

Circular Motion and Centripetal Forces

The students are full of misconceptions about circular motion (like gravity). They "know" that there is a force pushing them outwards when they go around a corner. They "know" if they are moving at the same speed, even if they are turning, they cannot be accelerating. This simulation lets them see that what they think they know isn't true and breaks it down to a very basic level so they can see their misconceptions.

Honors or Advanced, Intro or Regular

The students get into pairs and work through the simulation, answering the questions as they go along.

Provides visualization or animation, Increases graphing skills, Provides a virtual lab, Provides additional content, Provides assessment opportunity

This simulation is very high interest for the students. Because of the other car, they have a clear goal: to beat the computer. The students are very engaged with this activity and need few (if any) reminders to stay on task.

The content is pretty good. It starts with basic acceleration (which is a nice refresher) and then builds on it. It uses nice graphics that show not only speed, but vertical velocity, horizontal velocity and acceleration. These gauges really let the students see what is happening to the car as it goes around corners.

There are some on-going issues my school in particular has with Kinetic Books activities. The option to save the answers within the Kinetic Books activities does not work, given the user restrictions on the students, so they are forced to go back and force with Word to answer the questions. I tend to find that this back and forth is too much for the computers and invariably, it will lock up during a simulation (usually when the student hasn't saved in some time).

I find the students, even after they have done a lab where we developed the centripetal force equation, still would rather guess and check, instead of using the formulas. They have a lot of difficulty applying knowledge from one lab to another. But the virtual lab encourages this guess and check by having them do this for the first few simulations. It doesn't lead them to the next logical step (using the formulas) as well as I would like.

The students need to the read the lab closely to properly answer the questions, which is what they should do, but they don't. For example, it says "Velocity is a vector, and it reflects both speed and direction." Then a page or two later, it asks, "In Exercise 2, a car traveling at constant speed accelerates. Explain, using the definition of velocity." They can never remember. So the lab is doing the right thing, but it doesn't acknowledge that the students don't read very closely.