First Assignment

Kino Matsuura

Department of Education, McGill University

EDEC 260

Professor Anthony Vandarakis

September 28, 2021

 Learning Projectile Motion with PhET

This is the link to the technology.

https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/projectile-motion/latest/projectile-motion_en.html

PhET is a digital educational platform that allows students to research and design

fundamental scientific experiments. It is open for anyone on the internet for free: students are

able to easily explore the platform outside of the classroom. Furthermore, its accessibility is

extended to those students with learning difficulties through its several accessibility features

such as alternative inputs and sound and sonification.

Aim

In any educational curricula, physics subjects introduce students with the concept of

interrelationships between theory and the physical world: International Baccalaureate (IB),

for example, is calculation intensive. Students are required to solve problems through

manipulation of physical formulas. Oftentimes, however, students encounter confusions in

terms of physical meanings of the formula, leading to miscalculations of the problems. PhET

is an effective way to visualize the relationship between formula and its physical meaning.

This assignment focuses on projectile motion as an example used in IB taught in tenth grade.

Methods to use PhET

Please note that three methods presented below are independent of each other.

1. Verify the relevance of equation of motion to our physical world

a. Instructors provide students with some problems on projectile motion that can

be solved with formulas learned in class.

b. After students attempted to solve the problems, let them go to PhET, adjust the

variables that were specified in the problem and compare the result of

simulation with their own answer. Students can put practical meaning on their

calculations.
 2. Conducting research

a. Individual students or a group of students are asked to verbally explain the

relationship between the launch angle and the horizontal displacement of the

ball landing on the ground by conducting simulation on PhET.

b. Students can create graphs to show the relationship between the launch angle

and the resulting displacement they observed through simulation. This method

helps the visual learners to visually understand the problem presented.

c. Students are then asked to support their observations using formulas. This

emphasizes the concept of physics that physical phenomena is predictable by

equations.

Connecting to our Coursework

In terms of the SAMR model, method 1 and 2 presented above represents the

substitution level. They use PhET as a direct substitution of traditional physical experiments

to simulation. However, this substitution is relevant to the enhancement of students’ learning,

as it allows all students to practice experiments with their own speed and it eliminates the

preparation cost and time required to do the experiment, so the students are able to freely set

various conditions to conduct the experiments: which of these are impossible in traditional

experiments.

In the context of Bloom’s taxonomy, the second method presented above especially

represents the top-down approach to the model. Students would create and plan the

experiment, analyze the result through putting the data on the spreadsheet, and through the

process, their understanding of the phenomena is being enforced, consequently helping them

to remember the physical meaning of the formula they used to explain the phenomena.
Peer Review