Forces and motion are areas
in which students have many misconceptions. Newtonian explanations are
counter to their experiences with the world. Students believe that if a
body is moving, then a force must be acting on it in the direction of the
motion.
According to the Benchmarks
for Science Literacy, middle-school students can start understanding the
effect of constant forces to speed up, slow down, or change the direction
of motion of an object. In middle school, students should have had a variety
of qualitative experiences with motion, friction, kinetic and potential
energy, and observing and graphing distance vs. time.
In high school their qualitative
ideas need to become more quantitative. High school physics students conduct
experiments and calculate speed, graphing distance vs. time in horizontal
directions.They also conduct experiments on falling bodies, calculating
speed (due to gravity) and graphing the change in velocity.
*** This module was designed with the emphasis on illuminating
the power and limitations of computational models in general. To this end
we are attempting to resolve the issues of the actual construction of the
STELLA model used during the lesson. It is our hope that we will resolve this
issue by focusing the brunt of the instruction for STELLA and other modeling
software in a technology course. At this point in time we plan to allow
students to create a simple model of a "falling rock" at the begining of
our 9th grade Conceptual Physics course. During this model the students
will explore many of the graphing features of STELLA. Later in the year
the students will revisit and revise the model for factors of friction
and moment of inertia. After the third visit to the model, we hope that
the students will be able to discuss the power of computational models
and the difficulties in trying to create a model that truly represents
"the real world". ***
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