Kinematics, roller coasters, and stop animation

On July 10, 2012, I helped lead a workshop for high school and middle school physics teachers. My portion of the workshop focussed mainly on velocity and acceleration as rates of change, and on interpretation of motion graphs. In addition, the presentation includes some loose guidlines for creating physics based animations with students. I enjoyed the workshop a great deal, and I hope these materials will be useful.

• Slides on velocity and acceleration: Power Point Presentation
• Slides on forces and free body diagrams by Tyson Littenberg: Power Point Presentation
• Sample stop animation movie with magical unicorn
• Link to free Windows stop animation software. This software was used to make the magical video above.

A complete data set for the Superman ride can be seen below. Click the image to download the file as a JPEG. The altitude plot seems to be reasonably accurate. The bottom plot shows the magnitude of the acceleration as a function of time, but seems to show a calibration off-set of around 10 m/s/s.

Roller Coaster Flip Book

This next activity was made for high school students in the Upward Bound program. The idea is to make a flip book that uses real physics. In general, flip books are a low cost and low tech alternative to stop animation. This particular activity uses conservation of energy to calculate the velocities, so the students don't have to know anything about acceleration.

Click the picture of the flip book to see it in action!

Here are some materials so you can try this in your classroom

• Sample flip book movie
• Power point directions to help you get started.