- My students learn the physics better
when they're acting as though they are true physicists.
I try to teach as much as possible
in a project-based approach in all of my classes.
I've seen enough success out of what it does
for students that I'm hooked on it.
One of the things about the project
that I think helps to make it successful,
and the style of teaching successful
is that students are motivated, because it's a real task
and they assume the role of a job that actually exists.
The project that I'm working on
with my AP Physics class is called the Mission to Mars.
The students were creating testable landers
that contain four eggs.
It was a very well thought out, egg drop experiment.
You guys are in the role of the EDL Systems Engineer,
Entry, Descent and Landing, to try to make a
lander that will end up on Mars.
When they see that there's this interesting problem
that is being tackled out there,
and is a thing that can lead to an actual job for them,
they're much more motivated to look deeper
at the actual physics behind it.
- It's like we're all being acted upon
by like, great forces all the time,
it just happens that the time of it
- The very first task is the project launch,
and in that activity students investigate
past designs of EDL systems that have landed rovers.
- And then we've got to figure out
how we're gonna attach this, so like,
if we're gonna use tape or glue
or maybe zip ties or something.
- The early stages of the project is getting motivated
and understanding the context.
Students really try to map out
what are gonna be the set of skills
they'll need to learn in order to tackle that problem.
As a teacher looking in on those days
it might look like a traditional physics lab.
My role then is to make sure that students
stay in character as a Systems Engineer.
From there students tackle air resistance,
which is one of the concepts in a lot of
introductory physics courses.
- We use the parachute to work with that
so we were trying to make the lowest
terminal velocity possible by increasing the surface area.
- You still need to finish up
your terminal velocity investigation, so that I know
you can quantify terminal velocity
and that you can apply it to your lander.
From there students develop a deeper understanding
of impulse and the change of momentum of their lander
as it makes contact with the surface of Mars.
- So we have four 50 gram weights, one for each egg
that we'll have in the actual test run,
and so that's just the masses that we're using to simulate.
We used different air bag designs
and so we used methods like, using force plate
and dropping it on a force plate to measure
how long the force was applied over.
The force spiked when it first hit
and then you can see that it bounced a couple times.
- These little air pockets right here,
I feel like that's really gonna help cushion the fall.
- The task for students actually
test their landers, is an energy analysis.
During that time students uncover and investigate
some of the important concepts of mechanical energy,
work and the conservation of energy.
Another big part of project-based learning for me
is that students have a public product.
So they're not just learning in isolation from a textbook
and learning how to do problems
that they can then write out on a piece of paper
and have me evaluate grid.
- And how did you decide?
Did you experiment at all
with different sizes of parachutes?
- We had a number of experts come in on that day,
engineers that worked in industry,
to evaluate and give feedback to the students.
- Three, two, one.
- Alright, got four out of four.
- [Johnny] What's that? No hairline fractures?
- No.
- I'm curious about the air bags.
- Yeah me too.
- You have Mr. Devine, like telling us
that these are the things that people actually do,
but that's different than having people
who are actually in the job being like,
"Yes, this is a thing that I do.
"This is some things that I noticed."
- Yeah, your guys is actually one that
I thought was good because it seems like
you guys thought in the 3D space maybe more.
In that many of these designs look like they relied
primarily on the air bag or the parachute right?
It was good to see the kids being able to
look at those equations and use them
to help guide their design,
because that's exactly what we have to do in industry.
- You can think of it conceptually.
Actually being able to test it?
And you have to repeat the equations
over and over and over again with different trials
of different airbags and different parachutes.
Just being able to use that math
over and over again, helps it stick.
- They are much more eloquent with their explanations.
Much more agile with their application
of the concepts when I've seen them construct
the knowledge themselves, versus simply
be handed the tool and explained how that tool works.
Alright, everybody ready?