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Velocity Stories

Daintry Zaterka
What do storytelling and physics have in common? In eighth grade physical science, students used storytelling to demonstrate their understanding of velocity and position and how they differ from speed and distance in their Motion Graph Projects this term.

Physical Science Teachers Eric Lane and Xiaohu Zhao began the project by asking students to write a story with two main characters, each of whom visits at least five different locations along a number line of destinations. Students could create any setting for their story, from a basic town to Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley or an undersea kingdom. “To understand Newton’s Three Laws of Motion, students must be able to grasp the concept of force acting in a direction,” says Xiaohu. To express their understanding of this concept, students were required to have their two main characters start at the same location in the story. They could only travel together on one leg of their journey, had to be traveling at different speeds, and had to travel to “positive” and “negative” locations in relation to the origin. When students wrote a second draft of the story and added numbers, the challenge was to use reasonable values for distance, speed, and time while incorporating appropriate stopping times at each location. Each character’s movements also had to make sense along a visual number line map and correlate to a position vs. time graph and a velocity vs. time graph. As students had two or more characters, they had to color-code the lines in their charts. The story, location map, and graphs had to be clearly, accurately, and creatively laid out on a poster board.

Ensuring that the text, numbers, and graphs all tell the same story tested students understanding of the velocity equation and their logic skills. However, students were engaged by the opportunity to create their own stories and, in some cases, their own worlds! “The characters and events were completely open-ended, and the students were generating their own calculations, but it connected to something that they were interested in,” says Xiaohu.
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