Blog Week 2

 8/28/23

Big Question: How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous? What affects a rider's speed down a slide?

• In lab we continued on our exploration of different types of play. This week we were focused on slides, which was very fun because it put the same concept of speed that we looked at last week into a new idea with friction. To investigate this we first thought about what may affect it from what we already know. From this, we thought of weight, height, and the material of both the slide and the rider's clothes, or in our case for the experiment the item going down. 
• My partner and I decided to focus on the height/ the slope of the slide. Our findings matched our hypothesis which was the steeper the slide the faster the "rider" would go down. We changed our angle each time by 10°. 

In lab, we continued this exploration, again using a more scientific lens. We explored forces such as gravity and friction and what effect each force had on objects in motion. I really enjoyed this lecture and the use of the probe assessments as these always make us second guess what we already know, and really think about how solid our knowledge is on these topics. We found that the slide surface pushes on the object, and the force points directly outward from the surface. This is why the steeper slides allow the rider to go down faster. I have grown to really love that we execute and experiment first and then go into the science of this method as we have recent real-life examples to make sense of the science. This is a strategy I will try to use with my students in hopes of engaging them more in the content.