Intro to Acceleration (Physics)

At a glance:

Topics: physics, acceleration, rate of change, velocity, distance

Grades: 8-10

Standards: NGSS HS-PS2-1

Duration to complete: 10-15 minutes

Learning outcome: Students will learn the definition of acceleration and begin to understand the relationship between acceleration, velocity, distance, and time.

Intro for students: Get up to speed on Acceleration. In our Intro to Acceleration experience, you’ll play with acceleration and time, and see how they affect velocity and distance. You’ll also learn how to do these calculations yourself. Accelerate your learning to new heights! #acceleration #physics #experiential #calculate #velocity #distance

What makes this topic challenging for kids?

Acceleration is a topic that students often have some familiarity with, but have trouble explaining. Often, acceleration’s effect on distance traveled is missing from students’ mental models of the concept. Furthermore, the relationship between acceleration and velocity is commonly misunderstood.

What’s our approach?

Our experience easily demonstrates the relationship between acceleration, velocity, distance, by providing a clear, reactive visual representation of all these variables at various values of time. As a student plays the acceleration slider, the velocity and distance graphs are clearly changed as a result. The graphical layout of the experience allows the student to easily take in much information on the effects of changing acceleration.

With its simple yet descriptive visuals that react to user interaction, this experience will accelerate a student’s physics intuition in no time.