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Score: 8
Awarded the NGSS Design Badge
Science Discipline: Physical Science, Engineering
Length: Unit
Year Reviewed: 2024
This unit is designed to introduce students to the concept of momentum and Newton’s second law in an intuitive and grounded context. The learning is anchored by a puzzling set of patterns in traffic collision data over time: while overall, vehicle fatalities have been decreasing steadily for decades, the trend appears to have reversed, with both collisions and fatalities increasing. This phenomenon provides the context in which to investigate the physical relationships among mass, velocity, momentum, force, time, and acceleration, basic physical quantities that provide the foundation for the study of mechanics. Students will analyze statistics on vehicle collisions, analyze the motion of vehicles stopping short, and model vehicle collisions as part of an engineering task to reduce the chances of injury in a collision by testing and evaluating solutions that could change force interactions in the system.
Link to Materials
The following link will direct you to the OpenSciEd Unit P.3 Collisions & Momentum page: P.3 Collisions & Momentum
NGSS Design Badge
Awarded: Jun 25, 2024
Awarded To: OpenSciEd Unit P.3 Collisions & Momentum
The NGSS Design Badge is awarded only to the version of this unit that was reviewed. If any modifications are made to this unit, the revised version cannot be promoted as having earned the badge.
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