Physics 11 – March 6
One of the more user friendly PBL lessons is done with the topic of power in physics. The basic idea is very simple: determine a test to determine which student is the most powerful. Students have to look up the definition of power, which at this point in the year should be relatively straight forward to understand, and then come up with their test. We had a good and diverse discussion in this activity.
I had not focused on the term “Work” much during energy. Mostly I avoided the Work-Energy theorem, which is not needed if you understand conservation of energy. However, without having a simple fallback to something like W = dEg or W = dEk, when solving power problems there are more steps to do. Specifically, students may start with conservation of energy to find the formula for Work, and then they apply it to Power. I may change this for next year.
BC Physics 180 