ILC HS Physics -1st Semester

This 1st semester of Physics focuses on forces in relation to charged particles, gravity, and momentum. Course/Unit Description* Longer description space for detail page. This will be used on the detail page where users are able to learn more about the course. Rich-text editor allows for html links. The course consists of three units. The first unit begins with students watching astronauts move around on the moon and noticing differences in motion compared to moving on Earth. They then build on prior knowledge of what causes objects to attract one another. After they collaborate on different types of attractive forces, they then explore what affects the force of attraction between objects: magnitude of charge and distance between interacting particles. The second unit begins with students watching a video of a woodpecker colliding with a tree and comparing that with two football players colliding and making them wonder why football players get injured and woodpeckers do not. They move on into learning how to define and describe motion of objects. Students collect displacement and time data on moving objects and learn how this connects to speed/velocity of objects and how to represent the motion graphically. After students learn about velocity, they start learning about changing velocity and that this is referred to as acceleration. The graphs of displacement versus time and velocity versus time can be used to derive the acceleration of an object. The third unit begins with students watching a video of acrobats performing on what is known as a teeter board. Students are told to ask questions about how the teeter board works and they develop a driving question board. Then students use the prior knowledge developed in Unit 2 to analyze the motion of the acrobats who are performing. They look at velocity versus time graphs of each set of acrobats and draw conclusions about their motion from the graphs.