Oh, no! I’ve dropped my phone! Most of us have experienced the panic of watching our phones slip out of our hands and fall to the floor. We’ve experienced the relief of picking up an undamaged phone and the frustration of the shattered screen. This common experience anchors learning in the Contact Forces unit as students explore a variety of phenomena to figure out, “Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?”

Student questions about the factors that result in a shattered cell phone screen lead them to investigate what is really happening to any object during a collision. They make their thinking visible with free-body diagrams, mathematical models, and system models to explain the effects of relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions. Students then use what they have learned about collisions to engineer something that will protect a fragile object from damage in a collision. They investigate which materials to use, gather design input from stakeholders to refine the criteria and constraints, develop micro and macro models of how their solution is working, and optimize their solution based on data from investigations. Finally, students apply what they have learned from the investigation and design to a related design problem.

Demonstrations explain the concepts of energy forms (sound, chemical, radiant [light], electrical, atomic [nuclear], mechanical, thermal [heat]) and states (potential, kinetic).

Learn about conservation of energy with a skater dude! Build tracks, ramps and jumps for the skater and view the kinetic energy, potential energy and friction as he moves. You can also take the skater to different planets or even space!

Learn about conservation of energy with a skater dude! Build tracks, ramps and jumps for the skater and view the kinetic energy, potential energy and friction as he moves. You can also take the skater to different planets or even space!

Students will: Predict the kinetic and potential energy of objects Design a skate park Examine how kinetic and potential energy interact with each other

This unit explores Performance Expectations MS-PS2-1, 2-2, 3-1, 3-5 and ETS1-4 via an engineering challenge to design the most efficient wind turbine. Students are pressed to explain why and how wind surfers are able to catch so much wind!

The University of Iowa Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research and College of Education teamed up to develop free eighth grade science curricula on land use and climate science, in response to Iowa’s grade level alignment of the middle school Next Generation Science Standards.

Primary author Dr. Ted Neal, clinical associate professor of science education, led a team of graduate and pre-service teaching students and CGRER scientists to develop the material. They grouped standards, resources and lesson material into six bundles, each designed to engage Iowa’s middle schoolers with local data and information on relevant topics like athletic concussions and agriculture.

These lessons are built on NGSS principles and put learning in the students’ hands with hands-on activities for groups and individuals. Kids will have ample opportunity to get curious, generate questions and lead themselves to answers.

This is a hands-on activity to learn that energy can be transformed into various forms. Potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. Moreover, this kinetic energy can be used (if more than the relative binding energy) to break atoms, particles and molecules to see “inside” and to study their constituents.

Playground Physics is an iPad and Progressive Web application (app) developed by the New York Hall of Science. The app is accompanied by a supplemental Teacher Guide for middle school teachers. The Playground Physics curriculum is a six-week supplemental physics curriculum, designed to be used alongside any existing science curricula in the middle grades. It includes a teacher guide and student work, and maps to the NGSS and NYSSLS. The curriculum is focused around three different units which each explore a major concept in physics (motion, force and energy) through a specific type of physical play (catching a ball, jumping, swinging).

Playground Physics is particularly well suited to supporting diverse learners because it leverages students’ abilities to playfully ask and answer their own questions to connect academic content to what they notice, describe and analyze about their own individual actions. Additionally, the multimodal nature of the program, which uses videos and images as well as kinesthetic exploration to build understanding, is less text-dependent than more traditional physics instructional materials.

Students conduct an experiment to determine the relationship between the speed of a wooden toy car at the bottom of an incline and the height at which it is released. They observe how the photogate-based speedometer instrument "clocks" the average speed of an object (the train). They gather data and create graphs plotting the measured speed against start height. After the experiment, as an optional extension activity, students design brakes to moderate the speed of the cart at the bottom of the hill to within a specified speed range.

Hundreds of scientific articles. Written for middle and high school students. Approved by scientists. Free.