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OpenSciEd Unit 8.1: Contact Forces Student Edition
Author(s): NATIONAL CENTER FOR
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2021
Pages: 98
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OpenSciEd Middle School science program addresses all middle 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. Students kick off a unit of study, investigate questions, piece together the puzzle in investigations, and problematize the next set of questions to investigate.
Unit 8.1: Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?
Oh, no! I’ve dropped my phone! Most of us have experienced the panic of watching our phones slip out of our hands and fall to the floor. We’ve experienced the relief of picking up an undamaged phone and the frustration of the shattered screen. This common experience anchors learning in the Contact Forces unit as students explore a variety of phenomena to figure out, “Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?”
Student questions about the factors that result in a shattered cell phone screen lead them to investigate what is really happening to any object during a collision. They make their thinking visible with free-body diagrams, mathematical models, and system models to explain the effects of relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions. Students then use what they have learned about collisions to engineer something that will protect a fragile object from damage in a collision. They investigate which materials to use, gather design input from stakeholders to refine the criteria and constraints, develop micro and macro models of how their solution is working, and optimize their solution based on data from investigations. Finally, students apply what they have learned from the investigation and design to a related design problem.
Lesson 1: What happens when two things hit each other?
Lesson 2: What causes changes in the motion and shape of colliding objects?
Lesson 3: Do all objects change shape or bend when they are pushed in a collision?
Lesson 4: How much do you have to push on any object to get it to deform (temporarily vs. permanently)?
Lesson 5: How does changing the mass or speed of a moving object before it collides with another object affect the forces on those objects during the collision?
Lesson 6: What have we figured out about objects interacting in collisions? How can we apply our new learning to answer questions about objects interacting in collisions?
Lesson 7: How much does doubling the speed or doubling the mass affect the kinetic energy of an object and the resulting damage that it can do in a collision?
Lesson 8: Where did the energy in our launcher system come from, and after the collisions where did it go to?
Lesson 9: How do other contact forces from interactions with the air and the track cause energy transfers in the launcher system?
Lesson 10: Why do some objects break or not break in a collision?
Lesson 11: What can we design to better protect objects in a collision?
Lesson 12: What materials best reduce the peak forces in a collision?
Lesson 13: How (and why) does the structure of a cushioning material affect the peak forces produced in a collision?
Lesson 14: How can we use our science ideas and other societal wants and needs to refine our designs?
Lesson 15: How can we use what we figured out to evaluate another engineer’s design?
NATIONAL CENTER FOR
OpenSciEd® was launched to improve the supply of and address the demand for high-quality, open-source, full course science instructional materials. The goals of OpenSciEd are to ensure any science teacher, anywhere, can access and download freely available, high quality, locally adaptable materials. Though the goal of providing full course materials is still a couple of years away, OpenSciEd is releasing six-week units of instruction as they are completed and externally evaluated as quality by Achieve’s Science Peer Review Panel. OpenSciEd classroom materials are an open education resource and therefore free to download, copy, use, and/or modify. You can download the instructional materials free of charge at Access Materials page on the OpenSciEd website. In an effort to lower barriers for all educators to use OpenSciEd, Kendall Hunt and OpenSciEd have partnered to sell high quality printed books, professional learning and lab kits.