Johnny Devine: My students learn the physics better when they’re acting as though they are true physicists. I try to teach as much as possible in a project-based approach in all of my classes. I’ve seen enough success out of what it does for students that I’m hooked on it. One of the things about the project that I think helps to make it successful, and the style of teaching successful is that students are motivated, because it’s a real task and they assume the role of a job that actually exists. The project that I’m working on with my AP Physics class is called the Mission to Mars. The students were creating testable landers that contain four eggs. It was a very well thought out, egg drop experiment. You guys are in the role of the EDL Systems Engineer, Entry, Descent and Landing, to try to make a lander that will end up on Mars. When they see that there’s this interesting problem that is being tackled out there, and is a thing that can lead to an actual job for them, they’re much more motivated to look deeper at the actual physics behind it.

Student: It’s like we’re all being acted upon by like, great forces all the time, it just happens that the time of it

Johnny Devine: The very first task is the project launch, and in that activity students investigate past designs of EDL systems that have landed rovers.

Student: And then we’ve got to figure out how we’re gonna attach this, so like, if we’re gonna use tape or glue or maybe zip ties or something.

Johnny Devine: The early stages of the project is getting motivated and understanding the context. Students really try to map out what are gonna be the set of skills they’ll need to learn in order to tackle that problem. As a teacher looking in on those days it might look like a traditional physics lab. My role then is to make sure that students stay in character as a Systems Engineer. From there students tackle air resistance, which is one of the concepts in a lot of introductory physics courses.

Elizabeth: We use the parachute to work with that so we were trying to make the lowest terminal velocity possible by increasing the surface area.

Johnny Devine: You still need to finish up your terminal velocity investigation, so that I know you can quantify terminal velocity and that you can apply it to your lander. From there students develop a deeper understanding of impulse and the change of momentum of their lander as it makes contact with the surface of Mars.

Elizabeth: So we have four 50 gram weights, one for each egg that we’ll have in the actual test run, and so that’s just the masses that we’re using to simulate. We used different air bag designs and so we used methods like, using force plate and dropping it on a force plate to measure how long the force was applied over. The force spiked when it first hit and then you can see that it bounced a couple times.

Student: These little air pockets right here, I feel like that’s really gonna help cushion the fall.

Johnny Devine: The task for students actually test their landers, is an energy analysis. During that time students uncover and investigate some of the important concepts of mechanical energy, work and the conservation of energy. Another big part of project-based learning for me is that students have a public product. So they’re not just learning in isolation from a textbook and learning how to do problems that they can then write out on a piece of paper and have me evaluate grid.

Engineer Marina Hernandez: And how did you decide? Did you experiment at all with different sizes of parachutes?

Johnny Devine: We had a number of experts come in on that day, engineers that worked in industry, to evaluate and give feedback to the students.

Johnny Devine: Three, two, one.

Student: Alright, got four out of four.

Johnny Devine: What’s that? No hairline fractures?

Student: No.

Engineer Marina Hernandez: I’m curious about the air bags.

Engineer Hallee Deutchman: Yeah me too.

Elizabeth: You have Mr. Devine, like telling us that these are the things that people actually do, but that’s different than having people who are actually in the job being like, “Yes, this is a thing that I do. “This is some things that I noticed.”

Engineer Dan Wade: Yeah, your guys is actually one that I thought was good because it seems like you guys thought in the 3D space maybe more. In that many of these designs look like they relied primarily on the air bag or the parachute right? It was good to see the kids being able to look at those equations and use them to help guide their design, because that’s exactly what we have to do in industry.

Elizabeth: You can think of it conceptually. Actually being able to test it? And you have to repeat the equations over and over and over again with different trials of different airbags and different parachutes. Just being able to use that math over and over again, helps it stick.

Johnny Devine: They are much more eloquent with their explanations. Much more agile with their application of the concepts when I’ve seen them construct the knowledge themselves, versus simply be handed the tool and explained how that tool works. Alright, everybody ready?

Science and Math Institute