Design Brief Topics - Mathematics

Suzanne Sumner's Use of Vernier Sensors to Teach Mathematics

As part of the STEM Talent Expansion through Research, Engagement, Preparation and Scholarships (STEREPS) grant, I worked with George Meadows in COE to create active, inquiry-based projects in the summer. We used Vernier equipment and Logger Pro software to collect data from in-class experiments. The textbook’s approach is to teach precalculus from the perspective of functions, and the software allowed us to find the best-fit functions to the data collected. The experiments were conducted in class, and the students completed worksheets to connect the experiments to the course material. In the first experiment the students weighed increasing numbers of pennies to determine the linear relationship between weight and quantity of pennies. For the second experiment the students used a motion sensor to find the parabolic relationship in the height of a tossed ball. In the third experiment the students studied the inverse relationship between air pressure and volume in a syringe. For the fourth experiment the students measured the exponentially decaying temperature of a cooling liquid. In the fifth experiment the students used a motion sensor to study the sinusoidal motion of a pendulum.

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