What Internet of Things projects are Stanford students developing? Stanford ME220 "Introduction to Sensors" is an introduction to the variety of sensors that are used in engineering practice. Students in this class get a comprehensive overview of common practices with sensors and learn the direction in which sensor technologies are heading.
This project will get your physical science/physics students involved in a number of Next Generation Science Standards, particularly in the NGSS science and engineering practices. This investigation provides a nice opportunity for the students to (1) suggest hypotheses, (2) design an experiment to test their hypotheses, (3) analyze and interpret their data, and (4) use principles of physics to explain their observations quantitatively.
Gears date back many centuries and are extremely useful since they can change the direction imposed by a source of power, as well as torque and speed. This lesson describes an experimental study of the relationship between gear ratio and angular velocity by using PocketLab Voyager and Wonder Gears. Wonder Gears is listed for ages 3+, with this lesson heavily emphasizing the “+” part of the description—since this lesson is perfect for junior high students aged 12 through 14. This is one of the many advantages of Po
Let’s imagine two scenarios:
1. Two identical vehicles, each of whose speedometers reads 50 mph, travel toward each other and experience a head-on collision.
2. Another identical vehicle, traveling at 50 mph, hits an unmovable, unbreakable and impenetrable rock wall.
Which collision is more severe from the viewpoint of one of these vehicles?
Have your students attach Voyager to a Speedway Wonder™ car, set up a Speedway track of their own design, and they will be ready to challenge one another in a unique way. The main idea is to collect angular velocity data while Voyager circuits the track. Then by carefully studying the angular velocity graphs produced, determine posible layouts of the track. A magnet at one location along the track, coupled with simultaneously measuring magneti
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.
The ability to quickly match empirical data to well-known mathematical models is an essential feature in the analysis of experiments. This technique is generally referred to as curve-fitting. The up-and-coming, but not yet leased, CloudLab software from PocketLab provides an easy way to fit data to models including linear, quadratic, power, exponential, and logarithmic. This curve-fitting can be done for any selected region of PocketLab data. This lesson provides a sneak preview of this CloudLab featu
Collection of angular velocity and acceleration sensor data is prone to seemingly random “noisy” variations, even when the associated motion appears to be smooth to the observer. The easiest way to compensate for this variation is to compute the mean value for the duration of such a random variation. The up-and-coming, but not yet leased, CloudLab software from PocketLab provides an easy way to compute means, standard deviations, and other statistics for a selected region of PocketLab data.
People of all ages have enjoyed playing with toy race cars for many decades. Anki OVERDRIVE is currently one of the most popular and technologically advanced race car sets available in the marketplace. Why not attach Voyager to an Anki supercar and give your students a fun way to study angular velocity?! Each student group can design there own racetrack and obtain a Voyager snapshot of angular velocity vs.
