Lesson 2 : Lab

Time Required: 200 minutes

Investigate force and motion claims: A local magazine has been claiming that mysterious forces are occurring in your town. And the terrifying headlines have been hurting local tourism as people avoid public spaces out of fear.
Students will investigate each claim by:

1. Completing three investigations on how forces and mass impact the motion of objects.
2. Connecting data collected from each investigation to one or more of Newton’s Laws of Motion.
3. Validating each of Newton’s Laws of Motion by presenting digital evidence collected from team investigations.

MS-PS2-1

Apply Newton’s Third Law to design a solution to a problem involving the motion of two colliding objects.* [Clarification Statement: Examples of practical problems could include the impact of collisions between two cars, between a car and stationary objects, and between a meteor and a space vehicle.] [Assessment Boundary: Assessment is limited to vertical or horizontal interactions in one dimension.]

MS-PS2-2

Plan an investigation to provide evidence that the change in an object’s motion depends on the sum of the forces on the object and the mass of the object. [Clarification Statement: Emphasis is on balanced (Newton’s First Law) and unbalanced forces in a system, qualitative comparisons of forces, mass and changes in motion (Newton’s Second Law), frame of reference, and specification of units.] [Assessment Boundary: Assessment is limited to forces and changes in motion in one dimension in an inertial reference frame and to change in one variable at a time. Assessment does not include the use of trigonometry.]

MS-PS2-4

Construct and present arguments using evidence to support the claim that gravitational interactions are attractive and depend on the masses of interacting objects. [Clarification Statement: Examples of evidence for arguments could include data generated from simulations or digital tools; and charts displaying mass, strength of interaction, distance from the Sun, and orbital periods of objects within the solar system.] [Assessment Boundary: Assessment does not include Newton’s Law of Gravitation or Kepler’s Laws.]

MS-PS2-5

Conduct an investigation and evaluate the experimental design to provide evidence that fields exist between objects exerting forces on each other even though the objects are not in contact. [Clarification Statement: Examples of this phenomenon could include the interactions of magnets, electrically charged strips of tape, and electrically charged pith balls. Examples of investigations could include first hand experiences or simulations.] [Assessment Boundary: Assessment is limited to electric and magnetic fields, and limited to qualitative evidence for the existence of fields.]