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Hey, what were your favorite physics labs

DrPizza

DrPizza

Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Trying to keep the class fun...
Next week, their physics lab is to collect data for waterballoons fired vertically, and calculate how far away I must stand after they pull a random angle out of a hat. (They shoot the water balloons at me) It turns the boring 2-D ballistics problems into something a bit more fun.

What labs did you guys do that were enjoyable/memorable?
 
Originally posted by: DrPizza
Trying to keep the class fun...
Next week, their physics lab is to collect data for waterballoons fired vertically, and calculate how far away I must stand after they pull a random angle out of a hat. (They shoot the water balloons at me) It turns the boring 2-D ballistics problems into something a bit more fun.
Click to expand...

That definately sounds like fun....we never did anything like that. 🙁
 
Making piles of various shapes of Barilla pasta in my granular materials class. Actually, it wasn't fun at all. It just made me hungry.
 
Originally posted by: DrPizza
Trying to keep the class fun...
Next week, their physics lab is to collect data for waterballoons fired vertically, and calculate how far away I must stand after they pull a random angle out of a hat. (They shoot the water balloons at me) It turns the boring 2-D ballistics problems into something a bit more fun.

What labs did you guys do that were enjoyable/memorable?
Click to expand...
I wish my labs were like that... 🙁
 
Do not recall. All I remember is the girl next to me had bigguns. All we did was goof around in class and I ended up getting the highest grade in class. haha
 
Originally posted by: GML3G0
Originally posted by: DrPizza
Trying to keep the class fun...
Next week, their physics lab is to collect data for waterballoons fired vertically, and calculate how far away I must stand after they pull a random angle out of a hat. (They shoot the water balloons at me) It turns the boring 2-D ballistics problems into something a bit more fun.

What labs did you guys do that were enjoyable/memorable?
Click to expand...
I wish my labs were like that... 🙁
Click to expand...

You should see the parallel/series circuits of electrocuting hotdogs. (actually, I do that as a demo). Oddly, nearly every student can remember which type of circuit cooks the hotdogs the best, but when I only did the demo with lightbulbs, only about half of the students remembered which type of circuit lit the bulbs the brightest.
 
I enjoyed my highschool teacher's variation of the same thing. Toy cars were placed on a ramp with a jump at the end (like a ski jump). We had to place a plastic drinking cup in the correct location to catch the car after being given a random height in which the car started.

Of course everyone enjoyed liquid nitrogen day. Shattering a bunch of normally soft and pliable items is always a fun distraction. It is surprizing how many students were too terrified to put their hand in a vat of it. (You feel absolutely nothing).
 
The coolest HS lab thing every wasn't really an experiment, the teacher just took some chunks of sodium and threw them in a bucket of water outside. We all wanted to know where to buy sodium after that.
 
Coolest one we ever did:

1. Place old textbooks in a cardboard box.
2. Attach a AA battery pack & LED on the edge of the box
3. Weigh it.
4. Suspend cardboard box from the ceiling - ie. a pendulum
5. Position a polaroid camera perpendicular to the swing direction of the pendulum. Camera has been modified so that the shutter stays open after it's released, until manually closed.
6. Turn out the lights, open the camera shutter.
7. Shoot the box of books with a 22
8. Close the camera shutter.
9. Measure the arc of the pendulum from the image of the LED on the polaroid. Dig the bullet out of the books and weigh it. Back out the muzzle velocity of the shot.
10. Repeat 1-9 with a crossbow bolt.

Fun stuff. Of course, you could never do it in todays environment 🙁 But I'd say it was one of the few *real* labs I've ever seen done in H.S. Real in the sense that it wasn't so pre-canned as to be nothing but a demonstration.

Then there was the time when the rocketry club couldn't launch outside due to rain...
And the time the home-made rocket fuel cooked off in the cabinet...
etc, etc.

I can't believe he never got fired for some of that crap 😀

 
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