Over the last six weeks of Term 1, Class 10A & 10B engaged in a voyage of discovery that is the Class 10 Physics Main Lesson: Forces and Motion. Students explored the historical method of scientific discovery. They started by observing a pendulum to make qualitative judgements – and decorate their books. From these observations they made small, but noticeable, changes to observe how it responds. Once they had completed a qualitative study of the pendulum, they could make a hypothesis about the physical laws governing what they observed, and then test these. Through exact measurement and repetition, they were able to arrive at a conclusion, where they either confirmed or refuted their own hypotheses.

This process mirrors the pathways forged by the great minds of history that studied the lawful motion of the physical world, be it through direct interaction or through observing the stars. Through repeating the journey of discovery that the great minds of Galileo, Huygens and Newton took, students can see the natural development of scientific understanding – though it only took them three weeks, and not centuries.

After exploring the pendulum, the class examined the force driving this motion: gravity. The conducted both classical free fall experiments and repeating Galileo’s inclined plane experiments. Both gave estimates for the acceleration due to gravity, but both experiments have their own limitations. Feeling the tension between the idealised results and the results they obtained provided a great opportunity to reflect of the experiments and how working in the real world often does not align with theoretical expectations.

Students completed their exploration by developing Newton’s laws of motion qualitatively, examining momentum as a property of objects, and working with and torque and equilibrium. We then examined how these principles apply to the playgrounds they grew up in, to help free their imagination for their final task. For this, students were charged with challenge of constructing a Rube Goldberg Machine, as a whole class. Limited only by imagination (and what their parents would let them use), the class came up with some amazingly creative sections for the machine.

Brett Kranz-Little
High School Physics Teacher