Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 3, Day 3) – Modeling Motion

Posted by hallep on Wednesday, June 29, 2016 in Grade 1, Grade 2, SAVY.

We made our first computational simulations of motion today––combining our preliminary work in ViMAP with our previous case of “constant speed robots”.
These models use the step-size of the computational turtle to represent the distance traveled in each increment of time and can be used predict total distances traveled in longer, imagined trips of our robots. We made our models as regular polygons (same side-length and same angle size). We asked the computational agents to keep track of the total distances traveled and graph the length of each side (speed) and the total distance traveled. These models and graphs will be even more interesting when speed is changing! Students advanced in their control of the spatial relationships in ViMAP and began to use the coordinate plane to specify where they wanted the turtle to be.

To dive into acceleration, we compared average speed on two different slopes. We have some clarification work to start with tomorrow. As we began to compile our data from the intro to the acceleration task, I see that we need to think together about how our many data points are clustering together, and discuss why the slope matters for speed!

Amy