Physical Science

Engage your students in engineering practices and classic force and motion and energy concepts in a fun and unique way. With a PocketLab attached to a Hot Wheels car and a track full of magnets, you'll be able to collect data on position, velocity, acceleration, and energy as your car zips up an over hills and around loops. Turn your students into theme park engineers and have them design "roller coaster" tracks, iterate on car designs for races, or teach basic concepts on position and velocity. This activity is sure to help engage your students in a meaningful way. 

Almost everyone enjoys watching the figure skating events in the Winter Olympic Games!  But only a select few worldwide with the required skills and God given talent have the opportunity to compete.  What about the rest of us?  We can’t even imagine how the Olympians manage to perform all of those fancy quad jumps and camel, layback, upright, and sit spins.  But we can sit in a chair, and with the right chair, we too can do a sit spin of sorts!  Add PocketLab and we can also learn some physics about conservation of angular momentum.

Have you ever wondered what your dog does all day long while you are at work?  Is resting the major “activity” or is there some occasional wandering?  Is there silence or periodic barking, such as when the mailman comes or a squirrel is seen through a window?  The author of this lesson has a couple of schnauzers, known for their predisposition for barking.  “Welcome to the Bark Side” is a frequent phrase voiced to passersby while I am taking the schnauzers for a walk.  But how much do they bark when cooped up in the house and I am out someplace?   And do they move around a lot or mostly nap

Late in 2017 a handful of companies began selling LED flame lamps that do a great job of simulating an actual burning fire. The illumination is bright, has a color temperature of a warm orange flame, and the light produces negligible heat while running at under 5 watts of electric power. This light seems to be a great replacement for traditional gas lanterns, hurricane lamps, and oil lamps.  The simulated flame is unbelievably realistic in the flame light purchased by the author. No obvious pattern could be detected in the flickering LED flame by observing the light with the eye.

Because of the fact that water expands when freezing, frozen water pipes can result in untold damage to a house. There are a variety of things that one can do to avoid this problem.

Here is a project that will challenge your students’ skill in interfacing PocketLab Voyager with Scratch Programming.  The challenge is to program the five bubbles to start bubbling upwards in the teapot—one bubble at 90ᵒC, two at 92ᵒC, three at 94ᵒC, four at 96ᵒC, and five bubbles at 98ᵒC.  When the temperature of the teapot has reached 100ᵒC, the phrase Full Boil should appear.  See the movie accompanying this lesson for clarification of the intended result.  When the burner under the real teapot is turned off and cooling begins, bubbling should go away in revers

A common experiment for studying the reflectivity of different colored surfaces makes use of colored construction paper, aluminum foil, a light source, and a light sensor.  Voyager’s light sensor and the little flashlight included with the Explorer Kit are perfect tools for performing this experiment.  Empty graphs and data tables suitable for copying for student use are included with this lesson.
 

Ozobot “Evo” (ozobot.com) is a tiny one-inch diameter robot that can be quickly programmed using a Google Blockly dialect known as OzoBlockly (ozoblockly.com).  This lesson combines the ability to program Ozobot to move freely in a straight line with Voyager’s ability to sense the resulting motion through its range finder.  Students compute the slope of the resulting position versus time graph to determine Ozobot’s velocity.

There are over a dozen activities that you can do with your PocketLab Maker Kit! Below you will find instructions and links each activity, and you can find more ideas by browsing hundreds of PocketLab lesson plans.

First, here is a video on how to assemble the Maker Kit cart.

Make a Magnetic Minesweeper game!

Can you devise an experiment to see whether increased CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere contributes to warming? We found a teacher who tweeted exactly what you need! @MontessoriMicky  shared with us his lesson plan on a Bottle Ecosystem and had his class run an experiment using PocketLab to measure the heat absorption of a glass bottle filled with CO2 vs normal air as a control.