•  Students' skills and concepts addressed by this module:
•  Understand the difference between speed and velocity
•  Understand the concepts of path, displacement and trajectory
•  Addition of vectors: velocity as a vector
•  Conceptual understanding of the different kinds of motion
•  Understand speed as a number and velocity as a vector
•  Understand the difference between path and displacement
• Estimated time for this module: 3 days
• Observations:
• We do not expect students to grasp the mathematical concept of vector, but qualitatively understand that some quantities have direction and others don't.
• To understand vectors (quantities that have direction), we used material from: http://home.earthlink.net/~dmocarski/chapters/chapter3/ch3page.htm, an online physics book.
• Other web pages of interest in this topic:
• http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/SEP/physical.html: A repository of web sites and pointers from UC Irvine Science Education Programs Office.
• http://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/index.html: The Exploratorium online snacks.
• http://littleshop.physics.colostate.edu/: The Little Shop of Physics
• http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Physics/Education/K_12/ : Yahoo directory of K-12 physics resources.
• http://zebu.uoregon.edu/nsf/ University of Oregon program integrating research and education.
• http://www.explorescience.com/ - More interactive activities, this time with Shockwave.
• http://www3.adnc.com/~topquark/fun/applets.html : More Applets, a bit more advanced.
• http://www.american.edu/IRVINE/bardhyl/introd.htm Animated Physics; worth the trip.
• http://id.mind.net/~zona/mstm/physics/mechanics/vectors/introduction/introduction Vectors.html Introduction to Vectors - very good but may be a bit advanced for 8th grade students.

• Understanding the concepts of speed, velocity and types of motion is the basis from which further understanding of movement (kinematics) and forces (dynamics) will be built, in particular the concepts introduced by Newton's Laws. The use of online activities will help reinforce the concepts learned in the classroom and with the hands-on activities.

Classroom activities:

• Use a toy car or cart on a flat surface. Put a mark on the ground every 2 feet or less, for example. Place one student at each mark with a stopwatch. Graph position of the cart as a function of time (measured from T=To) for each one of the movements above. Note that we are dealing here with motion along one line, i.e., one-dimentional motion.
• The students should build a table with position and the corresponding times for the cars. Then they should transpose the table to a graph, with position in the y axis and time in the x axis. This classroom activity will help them to understand velocity as a variation in the position as a function of time.

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Student Guide: