OpenSciEd Physics + Earth & Space Unit 3: Collisions & Momentum Teacher Edition

OpenSciEd High School addresses all high school NGSS standards. This comprehensive science curriculum empowers students to question, design, investigate, and solve the world around them. 

• Phenomenon Based - Centered around exploring phenomena or solving problems
• Driven by Student Questions - Storyline based on students’ questions and ideas 
• Grounded in Evidence - Incremental building and revision of ideas based on evidence 
• Collaborative - class and teacher figure out ideas together
• Equitable - Builds a classroom culture that values ideas and learning of all

The OpenSciEd model uses a storyline approach, introducing phenomena that anchors storylines developing disciplinary core ideas, concepts, and science/engineering practices. Students are encouraged to dive deep into key points and solve problems through five activities. 

P.3 Collisions & Momentum: What can we do to make driving safer for everyone?

This unit is designed to introduce students to the concept of momentum and Newton’s second law in an intuitive and grounded context. The learning is anchored by a puzzling set of patterns in traffic collision data over time: while overall, vehicle fatalities have been decreasing steadily for decades, the trend appears to have reversed, with both collisions and fatalities increasing. This phenomenon provides the context in which to investigate the physical relationships among mass, velocity, momentum, force, time, and acceleration, basic physical quantities that provide the foundation for the study of mechanics. Students will analyze statistics on vehicle collisions, analyze the motion of vehicles stopping short, and model vehicle collisions as part of an engineering task to reduce the chances of injury in a collision by testing and evaluating solutions that could change force interactions in the system.