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This is an inquiry activity in which students discover what a radian is. Some students may already know how many degrees are in a radian or how many radians are in a circle, but they rarely know the definition of a radian. Knowing the definition will...
Book Chapter
This lab is an inquiry activity in that students will likely not know which direction the marble will travel and will discover it with some guidance. It also reinforces the method of preparing a hypothesis before performing an inquiry activity. Altho...
Book Chapter
This lab is purely a thought experiment. Although students are given an introduction to angular speed and tangential speed, they will discover the relationship between the two in this activity. The lab is an inquiry activity in that students do not k...
Book Chapter
This inquiry activity should be performed before students have learned about acceleration but after they have learned about speed. Students should have already completed distance versus time graphs for objects traveling at constant speed (see Lab 1)....
Book Chapter
This inquiry activity is intended to be an introduction to moment of inertia beyond just mathematical calculations. It provides some background in moment of inertia and allows students to discover that the distribution of mass in the object affects i...
Book Chapter
Although not inquiry, this activity is important for students to understand what an ellipse is and what a focus is, and to break misconceptions about Earth’s orbit being highly elliptical. This is the perfect place to check to see if students have ...
Book Chapter
This lab is an inquiry activity in that students do not know the answer and have probably never experienced this phenomenon. Most students have seen that water in U-tubes is always equal height on both sides. This lab will be both a discrepant event ...
Book Chapter
This activity is one for which you can find a lot of different explanations on the internet, but most of them are wrong. Some say that the soap is ejected from the back of the boat. Others say that water is ejected from the back of the boat. Still ot...
Book Chapter
This activity will help students see that a low center of mass helps objects balance. This is important engineering in car and motorcycle racing and robotics. This activity is inquiry in that students would probably predict that you could not get one...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry because students have likely never used this method for determining center of mass. The activity is also useful when building soda bottle rockets for estimating the center of pressure. Students can make a cardboard cutout of ...
Book Chapter
This lab is an inquiry activity if it is done before the discussion of how center of mass and balance are related. However, students should have an idea of what center of mass is before they start the lab. Students should see that when the center of ...
Book Chapter
This inquiry activity should be completed before students have learned about spring constants. It should be pointed out to students that if a rubber band or spring is stretched too much, the spring constant is not constant. Graphs will vary based on ...
Book Chapter
Although this would not be considered a standard lab, it does help students with projects and other labs that involve the combinations of springs or rubber bands. Even if the activity is not used elsewhere, it allows students one more chance to pract...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry because students should not yet know the equation for centripetal force. Although they will not exactly derive the equation from this lab, they will determine that there is a direct relationship between force, mass, and veloc...
Book Chapter
This lab is not an inquiry activity but will help students understand the meaning of average velocity. Students do not easily understand from a textbook that an object’s velocity changes over a period of acceleration. They have difficulty understan...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry because students have not yet been exposed to the idea of gravitational potential energy being converted into kinetic energy. Students should be able to measure this by performing this activity. They will compare the velocity...
Book Chapter
Teachers may want to show students a completed soda can vehicle because the written instructions can be difficult to follow for some students. These cans can travel a long distance (an entire school hallway is possible). Soda cans may have sharp edge...
Book Chapter
In this lab, students will use a little background information about Bernoulli’s principle to figure out how the spinning of a moving ball affects its trajectory. The activity is inquiry in that students will be discovering this relationship on the...
Book Chapter
In this lab, students will see that for any object that sinks, the object displaces more water when it is floating than when it is submerged. This lab is inquiry in that students do not know the answer to the question before they begin. The teacher c...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry in that the students do not know the answer to the question before they begin. Students will use the calibrated rubber band that they created in Lab 27: Spring Constants. They will see that an object is lighter when submerged...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry in that students do not know the answer before they begin. If you were to poll the class before doing this activity, you would probably find that the hypotheses are split down the middle of the class....
Book Chapter
In learning how this apparatus works, students will improve their understanding of action/reaction. This knowledge will also help students understand how a rocket engine works and many other important phenomena. Just as the exhaust coming from the re...
Book Chapter
This lab is not inquiry-based because the teacher must explain how to calculate pressure before doing the activity, but the lab gives students a great concept of what PSI means. They usually have no idea if 10 PSI is a lot or a little. They also don�...
Book Chapter
In this inquiry activity, students do not know the equation for pressure versus depth before beginning, but through guided activities they discover it themselves. This is a powerful way to get students to conceptually understand the equation and reme...
Book Chapter
This is an inquiry activity in that there is no one correct answer. Each student will come up with a different solution with different levels of success. Students should have been exposed to conduction, convection, and radiation in elementary or midd...
Book Chapter
This lab is not an inquiry activity. Without a motion sensor, the students cannot determine independently that the final velocity is double the average velocity. This activity does, however, make this concept concrete in their minds. By doing only wo...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry in that students cannot locate or define center of percussion before the lab. Even though it appears to students that the point of this lab is to find the center of percussion, the real point is to learn about the period of a...
Book Chapter
In this inquiry activity, students will discover the relationship between length and pitch (frequency), tension and pitch, and mass per unit length and pitch without being instructed first. Many students confuse pitch and volume, so the teacher may h...
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This lab introduces students to refraction using something they can experience. They really do not understand what is going on when a pencil is put into water and appears to bend. It is difficult to see rays of light bending without the use of a lase...
Book Chapter
This inquiry activity will be students’ first exposure to ray diagrams. They will be using the refraction of sound to simulate the refraction of light to introduce them to this concept. They will be creating a simulated convex lens with a CO2-fille...
Book Chapter
This is the first time that students will draw technical ray diagrams (in previous experiments, they simply sketched the rays). They need a little instruction in drawing ray diagrams before they can do it, so the activity is not purely inquiry. But i...
Book Chapter
This inquiry activity will be used before discussing curved mirrors in class. Students will discover how curved mirrors act and how the size and the orientation of the image are related to the distance from the mirror. Ray diagrams for curved mirrors...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry in that students do not know how colors are combined. They likely think that the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. In fact, there are two sets of primary colors: red, green, and blue for additive colors of light, and ...
Book Chapter
Although this lab is not an inquiry activity, it is another exercise to help students think about light rays and ray diagrams. The students think that the point of the lab is to calculate the diameter of the Sun. Really, the point is to get used to t...
Book Chapter
This activity is Level 2 inquiry in that students will not know in advance that the relationship is inverse square. Although they may not get a perfect inverse square graph, it will be clear that it is not a perfect straight line. This activity can a...
Book Chapter
In this inquiry activity, students will discover some of the rules of reflection of water waves, how waves travel around boundaries, and how waves move floating objects before they have learned these concepts. If students have difficulty seeing the w...
Book Chapter
This lab is a Level 2 inquiry activity that should be taught after students understand acceleration but before they learn the equations for calculating the acceleration of a body dropped from a certain height. After this activity, students should und...
Book Chapter
Students will once again be reminded of the inverse square nature of light intensity. This is a concept that students often struggle with, especially when calculations are involved. The important idea of this lab is not to actually figure out the wat...
Book Chapter
This activity is inquiry in that students have not yet studied interference or interference patterns. Students without a computer at home should be instructed as where they can go to use a computer with speakers that will allow them to install softwa...
Book Chapter
In this inquiry activity, students will get some experience with static electricity before getting deep into electricity and magnetism. They will not know which combinations will generate static electricity and will test some materials of their own c...