Falling Objects

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Fall 2009-Day 14
Force and Motion Activities

Activity

We started off class by having the students take a diagnostic question on force. The question was something like, “If you have a heavy object and a light object, and you drop them at the same time from the same height, which one will land first and why?” Most of the students wrote that they thought the heavy object would land first because it weighed more, thus causing it to fall faster.

Emily had the students pair up to test out their hypothesis. Each pair was given a heavy object and a light object of the same shape. The students attempted to drop the two objects at precisely the same time from the same height. The other partner watched closely to determine which object hit the ground first. They found that the two objects landed at nearly the exact same time. They found this to be shocking because it went against their initial thoughts about what would happen. The students tried this several times and found that they landed at just slightly different times. They blamed this on human error since the students cannot drop the two objects at EXACTLY the same time.

Video

Here is a video of students testing out Galileo's Falling Object Theory

falling_objects_clip.mov