Transcript Document

Middle School Science
The Philadelphia School
Yes, it’s rocket science :
TPS teachers Laura Matheny, Virginia Friedman, and
Steve Bartholomew collaborated with Phil Nelson
(University of Pennsylvania Physics Department), doing
hands-on science with middle-school students.
QuickTime™ and a
Cinepak decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
At many schools, middle-school science instruction is based
on learning and repeating poorly understood facts. We
preferred to show children some intrinsically exciting
phenomenon, take some quantitative data, make some
graphs, and ask for their ideas. Then we try to connect to other
phenomena.
Above, students launch bottle-rockets they designed. Right,
Nelson discusses the analysis.
Middle School Science
The Philadelphia School
Yes, it’s rocket science :
Above, Virginia Friedman discusses the idea of
constant-acceleration motion. Right, a
student’s graph of height versus time.
We obtained the trajectories by analyzing individual
video frames from movies like the one above, then
graphed the height at each successive frame. The
resulting graph was a parabola, showing constant
acceleration; measuring its curvature gave a surprisingly
accurate value for the acceleration of gravity.