Middle School Inquiry Lab on Graphing Kinetic Energy
In this lab students will change the mass and speed of a car to increase the kinetic energy.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How does changing the mass or speed of an object impact the kinetic energy of the object?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
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Materials List:
- toy car
- car tracks (2 m total length)
- book or blocks to create a ramp
- various fishing weights
- stopwatch
- balance
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, there are two parts for students to complete. Part 1 deals with mass and kinetic energy. Students will create a ramp with the car tracks and books and will be releasing the toy car down that ramp. For each trial, students will calculate the time it took in seconds and will calculate the average time for each car. Students will change the variable of the cars' mass in order to see if that affects the time it takes the cars to complete the ramp.
Part 2 deals with speed and kinetic energy. Students will be using the same car and same ramp, except now they'll be using a pushing force. Students will complete three trials for each variable: no pushing, small force, and large force. Students will document the time it takes the car to complete the ramp for each trial and then will have to calculate the average speed.
When students have recorded all data from each section, students will take their information and create two bar graphs, one on the kinetic energy related to mass, and the other on kinetic energy related to speed.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- Based on your experiment, why do soap-box derby competitions limit the weight of the cars?
- How do changes in kinetic energy explain why it is more fun to sled down a snowy hill with two people on a sled instead of one?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
NGSS: MS-PS3-1 – Construct and interpret graphical displays of data to describe the relationships of kinetic energy to the mass of an object and to the speed of an object.
