Learning About Solar Energy and Physics

The students will be learning physics. Students will break up into groups of 4. They will be presented with the question: Which source of energy do you think will make a solar car travel faster; artificial light or natural sunlight? Students will need to come up with a hypothesis or educated prediction to this question. Students will then need to identify the parts of the scientific method; variables, controls, materials, procedure and possible sources of error. The students will need to set up an experiment to test their question. Their independent variable will be the light source sun vs. indoor light and their dependent variable will be the velocity of the car. Students will set their control as the distance the car will travel. Students will need to come up with their own materials list and procedure although they will be told they will be given a solar car building kit and a meter stick. Then students will create a data table in their Google Docs account. They can use an ipad to enter their data into Google docs as they do their trials this way the data is accessible by the whole class. Students will conduct their first set of trials indoors using the classroom lights. Then the class will go outside and test their solar cars in the sunlight. Students will be measuring how fast the cars travel in a set distance. The ipad will be used to enter data. Back in the classroom, students will calculate the velocity of their solar car by dividing distance/time for each trial. Students will then add vectors and units to their values. Students will then calculate the acceleration of cars. Since students will be entering their data onto a class shared google docs spreadsheet, they will be able to work in groups to analyze data from the whole class. They will be able to look for class wide trends in the data. Then they will use the ipad to create a graph for their data and upload it into google docs. Finally the students will be responsible for answering the question they began the lab with and creating a written lab report about their experiment and calculations.