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Home Concept Builders Newton's Laws

Concept Builders - Newton's Laws

A Concept-Builder is an interactive questioning module that presents learners with carefully crafted questions that target various aspects of a concept. Each Concept Builder focuses the learner's attention upon a discrete learning outcome. Questions target that outcome from a variety of angles using multiple difficulty levels or varying activities. The following Concept Builders target concepts associated with Newton's Laws of Motion.

Activities

Air Resistance and Skydiving

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To combine an understanding of the factors affecting air resistance with an application of Newton’s second law and kinematic concepts in order to analyze a skydiver’s motion.

Balanced vs. Unbalanced Forces

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To analyze a variety of representations of an object’s motion and to draw conclusions about the state of motion and the relative strength of the forces acting on the object.

Change of State

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To identify the manner in which the individual forces must change in order for an object to change its state of motion.

Fnet = m•a

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To use Newton's second law equation to determine the individual force values required to cause a specified acceleration.

Force and Motion

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To use an understanding of the effect of balanced and unbalanced forces upon the motion of an object in order to predict how an object will move under a certain set of force conditions.

Mass and Weight

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To distinguish between the concepts of mass and weight and to calculate the mass and the weight from given information.

Match That Free-Body Diagram

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To identify the free-body diagram (FBD) that is consistent with a given physical situation.

Net Force (and Acceleration) Ranking Tasks

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To use an understanding of Net Force and Newton’s Second Law to rank objects according to their net force and their acceleration.

Normal Force Card Sort

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To analyze a physical situation in order to determine the relative strength of the normal force experienced by an object.

Newton's Second Law - Equations as Guides to Thinking

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To use Newton’s second law to predict the effect of varying net force and varying mass upon the acceleration of an object.

Recognizing Forces

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To utilize an understanding of the various types of forces in order to analyze a given situation and to identify the presence or absence of a variety of force types.

Solve It! with Newton's Second Law

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To use the Fnet = m•a equation to analyze situations involving unbalanced forces and accelerations.

Which One Doesn't Belong? Force and Motion

🞋︎ Learning Goal: To interpret various representations of an object’s motion in order to relate the relative strength of the forces that act upon the object to the subsequent motion of the object.