Digital Flipbooks: Stop-action Films of Accelerated Motion

What Happens:Students are assigned an initial velocity and a rate of acceleration for their toy car (or other object). They then use the one-dimensional constant acceleration formulae to determine the position of their toy car every second. Next, they use the MacBook's built in iSight camera and Photo Booth software to take pictures of their toy car at each of these locations. Each picture becomes a "frame" of their stop action film. To complete the film, they import each picture into Powerpoint so that each frame becomes a slide. After arrange the slides into the proper order, they set the Powerpoint presentation to have automatically timed transitions every second--the frame rate of the video--and export the presentation as a quicktime movie.