This activity is a field investigation where students will gather data on speed, acceleration, gravity, friction, and forces. They will design and conduct an investigation.

This physics activity is a projectile motion / gravity investigation where students drop and shoot (horizontally) soft balls from different heights and record the time taken to hit the ground. Students make a trendline to predict the time it will take the ball to hit the ground from a certain height. Students will also discover that shot and dropped balls hit the ground at the same time.

Students use media resources and an in-class investigation to explore the types of energy within different types of systems. They also use the formulas for kinetic and potential energy to examine the path of a projectile.

In this physics interactive lecture demonstration, students will investigate the effects of acceleration due to gravity in a number of different situations using a plastic water bottle. Based on an original activity from Peter Hopkinson, AAPT.

How do we communicate with each other? How do we communicate with people who are close by? How do we communicate with people who are far away? In this lesson, students will explore the role of communications and how satellites help people communicate with others far away and in remote areas with nothing around (i.e., no obvious telecommunications equipment). Students will learn about how engineers design satellites to benefit life on Earth. This lesson also introduces the theme of the rockets curricular unit.

In this lesson, students are introduced to both potential energy and kinetic energy as forms of mechanical energy. A hands-on activity demonstrates how potential energy can change into kinetic energy by swinging a pendulum, illustrating the concept of conservation of energy. Students calculate the potential energy of the pendulum and predict how fast it will travel knowing that the potential energy will convert into kinetic energy. They verify their predictions by measuring the speed of the pendulum.

Students learn about landslides, discovering that there are different types of landslides that occur at different speeds from very slow to very quick. All landslides are the result of gravity, friction and the materials involved. Both natural and human-made factors contribute to landslides. Students learn what makes landslides dangerous and what engineers are doing to prevent and avoid landslides.

The purpose of this exercise is to learn how to think about gravity, learn about scientific methodology, and transition from the Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian understanding of gravity.

The purpose of this exercise is to learn how to think about gravity, learn about scientific methodology, and transition from the Aristotelian to the Newtonian understanding of gravity.

Students learn about how biomedical engineers create assistive devices for persons with fine motor skill disabilities. They learn about types of forces, balanced and unbalanced forces, and the relationship between form and function, as well as the structure of the hand. They do this by designing, building and testing their own hand "gripper" prototypes that are able to grasp and lift a 200 ml cup of sand.

In this lesson, students learn about the physical properties of the Moon. They compare these to the properties of the Earth to determine how life would be different for astronauts living on the Moon. Using their understanding of these differences, they are asked to think about what types of products engineers would need to design for us to live comfortably on the Moon.

Students learn about the weighted mean by building spreadsheets that apply this concept to the average density of the oceanic lithosphere.

Students are introduced to the structure, function and purpose of locks and dams, which involves an introduction to Pascal's law, water pressure and gravity.

Can you avoid the boulder field and land safely, just before your fuel runs out, as Neil Armstrong did in 1969? Our version of this classic video game accurately simulates the real motion of the lunar lander with the correct mass, thrust, fuel consumption rate, and lunar gravity. The real lunar lander is very hard to control.

A realistic mass and spring laboratory. Hang masses from springs and adjust the spring stiffness and damping. You can even slow time. Transport the lab to different planets. A chart shows the kinetic, potential, and thermal energy for each spring.

A realistic mass and spring laboratory. Hang masses from springs and adjust the spring stiffness and damping. You can even slow time. Transport the lab to different planets. A chart shows the kinetic, potential, and thermal energy for each spring.

This is a physics lab where students test their reaction time by using the acceleration due to gravity. The use of Excel is introduced in this lab to analyze data.

Using the LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT kit, students construct experiments to measure the time it takes a free falling body to travel a specified distance. Students use the touch sensor, rotational sensor, and the NXT brick to measure the time of flight for the falling object at different release heights. After the object is released from its holder and travels a specified distance, a touch sensor is triggered and time of object's descent from release to impact at touch sensor is recorded and displayed on the screen of the NXT. Students calculate the average velocity of the falling object from each point of release, and construct a graph of average velocity versus time. They also create a best fit line for the graph using spreadsheet software. Students use the slope of the best fit line to determine their experimental g value and compare this to the standard value of g.

This mechanical model of the phalarope beak, showing the transport of a micro-liter droplet, helped researchers from MIT and colleagues from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris discover how the phalarope propels food upwards to its throat. The video was captured at 2000 frames per second but has been slowed down to 30 fps for this clip. Researchers had known that the phalarope draws food-rich water into its mouth in a gravity-defying manner, but until now, no one knew how. Using a mechanical model of the phalarope beak, the MIT and Ecole Polytechnique researchers recently discovered how the birds use surface interactions between their beaks and the water droplets to propel bits of food from beak tip to mouth.

Students explore how different materials (sand, gravel, lava rock) with different water contents on different slopes result in landslides of different severity. They measure the severity by how far the landslide debris extends into model houses placed in the flood plain. This activity is a small-scale model of a debris chute currently being used by engineers and scientists to study landslide characteristics. Much of this activity setup is the same as for the Survive That Tsunami activity in Lesson 5 of the Natural Disasters unit.