Dropping the Ball

Getting out of the confining four walls of your classroom is an easy way to add excitement and engagement to a lesson. The material you're trying to sell your students becomes more alive as they travel and experience the lesson. If nothing else, your class is neither boring nor entirely predictable.

For my gravity unit I take students on a trip to the stairwell just around the corner from my 3rd floor room. The idea of small "field trips" comes from Dave Burgess' book Teach Like a Pirate. Field trips are a great hook! Even though it is only 10 meters from the science room, we are still outside the room. Instant engagement!

From the stairwell I drop a baseball and we time how long it takes to hit the ground. I have one student at the bottom as my ball retriever, 3 to 4 student timers, and a data collector. The other students watch. Students get a kick out of having a teacher do something that is normally forbidden. The whole process going to the stair well and collecting data takes only about 10 minutes. I repeat the data collection at most 3 times to get decent data. No need for it to be perfect and one class period it only took one go.

Once we return to class we calculate how fast the ball is going when it hits the ground. I have them work through the math in both miles-per-hour and m/s. The field trip does not eliminate all the complaining about doing math (in science even!) but some students are excited to try and work it out and see what the results are.

Do students need to be able to do this on a test? Of course not! Do they need to understand acceleration due to gravity and how math and experimentation can be used to solve problems? Yes, and that is the goal of this activity; give some excitement to class and foster deeper understanding.