Does Contact Area Matter?

Physics learners experiment with three laboratory activities to learn about air resistance and friction. First, they use a hair dryer to move different sized spheres to determine the relationship between cross-sectional area and air...

The first activity may not work for your class if you don't have access to an open area of 30 meters and two cars of different masses, but the remaining activities can be used in any physics course. They all involve the investigation of...

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a modern aircraft with cross-sectional areas taken into consideration. A short video in the Real Engineering playlist describes how cross-sectional areas of airplanes relate to their speeds. It shows...

Using the same method for measuring friction that was used in the previous lesson (Discovering Friction), students design and conduct an experiment to determine if the amount of area over which an object contacts a surface it is moving...

Introduce the concept of hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and degrees of freedom with a short video that also covers the chi-square test and works through several examples to help viewers understand the material.

Students investigate the effect of weight on normal friction or the friction due to surface roughness. They tell about the effects of contact area that occurs as a result of molecular attraction by looking at data on line graphs.

If most gases are invisible, how do we know so much about them? Pupils practice associating the name, formula, testing method, and outcome for four common gases using an interactive. Users build on the content of their first puzzles to...

In this lesson plan, students use previous knowledge about friction to formulate hypotheses concerning the effects of weight and contact area on the amount of friction between two surfaces. In the Associated Activities (Does Weight...

In the first of two lessons of this curricular unit, students are introduced to the concept of friction as a force that impedes motion when two surfaces are in contact. Student teams use spring scales to drag objects, such as a ceramic...

With a simple demonstration activity, students are introduced to the concept of friction as a force that impedes motion when two surfaces are in contact. Then, in the Associated Activity (Sliding and Stuttering), they work in teams to...