Roller+Coaster+Activity

=Roller Coaster (Kinetic & Potential Energy) Activity= Author: Tom Hayden (thayden@gmail.com) Date: 5/20/2011

This lesson only consisted of an activity, there was no presentation or lecture component. The main thing I wanted to find was a computational tool that was fun, educational, and still looked somewhat reasonably like a roller coaster. There were tons of activities online that didn't meet this criterion. To get to the one here, you can follow the link in the worksheet below. Some of the general goals of this activity were:
 * Give students more practice taking recordings and working with energy measurements
 * Have the students draw a schematic of the roller coaster, complete with labels, etc.
 * Have them think about the relation of potential, kinetic, and dissipated energies.

This is a very introductory lesson into the topic.

Activity Component
[|Worksheet Link (Google Docs)]