Newton's Laws
This list of resources is designed to support the teaching of Newton's Laws of Motion.
Career Clips: Forces and motion in computer games *suitable for home teaching*
This thirteen miniute video is an ideal way to put the maths and physics being taught into some real-life context.
Computer video game makers are interviewed and explain how they use the laws of gravity, Newton's laws and momentum to make the motion of playears in an American football game as realistic as possible.
The interviews are punctuation by cartoon explaining the laws being considered.
Measuring the Thrust of a Balloon Powered Car
An good introductory activity for students to explore, investigate and use Newton's Laws of Motion.
A practical activity in which students make their own balloon powered car.
A distance-time graph, a velocity-time graph and an acceleration time graph are plotted.
The thrust is then calculated using f=ma.
Episode 210: Preparation for Newton’s Laws of Motion
This resources gives an introduction to two further resources linked to in the description.
Newton's Second Law of Motion gives full instructions on how to set up an experiment using pulley's where students make a table of results and plot a graph of acceleration against force before interpretting their results with refernce to newton's secon law of motion.
Newtons Third Law of Motion: this resource contains teacher notes, details of an experiment to be performed, tasks for the student, questions to be answerd and suggested homework.
Solving Problems Using Newton's Second Law O3
This resource is idfeal for consolidation work and for highlighting student misconceptions.
Problem One requires students to interpret the information contained in the question relating to forces and the coefficient of friction, draw a force diagram, resolve the forces and find the acceleration and state the assumptions made.
Problem Two contains just a force diagram. Students have to decide what the question ids for themselves, resolve the components and solve their problem.
Problem Three just contains the resolved components. Students have to decipher the force diagram, the question and find a solution from just the information given.
Problem Four just gives the solution to a problem. Students have to decipher the rest of the information from the given solution.
Problem Five just gives the assumptions made. Students have to make up their own problem in which the assumptions made are sensible.
Decision and Mechanics Materials
The second resource, exploring equations of motion makes a good revision resource.
Students, working in groups, attempt parts (a) and (b) of an examination question, discuss the strategies used to solve the problem, then suggest a part (c) to the question.
