Topics Overview: kinematics, projectiles, Newton’s laws and forces, momentum and impulse, circular motion, work and mechanical energy, power and efficiency (all students); torque, angular momentum and moments of inertia, rotational kinetic energy (HL only).
Detailed list of IB syllabus understandings and related guiding questions
Suggested Future Physics Contexts: drone performance parameters, drone package delivery, eVTOL rotor motion and thrust, estimating EV power requirements, estimating torque requirements for eVTOLs (HL).
Skills in the study of physics to be explicitly taught: Measuring common physical quantities, data processing, orders of magnitude, proportionality, percentage difference, vectors, radians, SI units, significant figures, uncertainty propagation, lines of best fit, uncertainty bars, uncertainties in gradients and y-intercepts, linearisation, estimating physical constants from gradients and y-intercepts, accuracy and precision, reliability and validity, random and systematic errors.
Note: since the list of skills in the study of physics that need to be introduced during the first unit of study is extensive, the above is a brief summary. For the complete list, see here.
Possible labs/activities to facilitate development of skills: drone motion video analysis, measuring acceleration of free fall with photogates and/or carts rolling down ramps, projectile motion video analysis (you can launch a ball horizontally off a table after rolling it down a ramp if you don’t have a launcher), verifying Newton’s 2nd law (with cart and hanging masses), static and dynamic friction (with wooden blocks and force sensors), verifying Archimedes’ principle, investigating terminal velocity (of spheres falling in oil or balloons falling in air), verifying conservation of momentum with video analysis (for example a cart rolling down a ramp and colliding with a stationary cart), investigating circular motion in a horizontal plane (e.g. with spinning rubber stoppers attached to hanging masses), verifying the work-energy principle (e.g. the work done pulling a cart up a ramp), drone lift force, power and efficiency.
HL: spinning a flywheel up/down with a hanging mass on its axle (and/or the PhET Torque simulation).
Linking questions that can be answered during this unit:
How does graphical analysis allow for the determination of other physical quantities?
If experimental measurements contain uncertainties, how can laws be developed based on experimental evidence?
How effectively do the equations of motion model Newton’s laws of dynamics?
Why is no work done on a body moving along a circular trajectory?
When can certain types of problems on projectile motion be solved by applying conservation of energy instead of kinematic equations?
How are the equations for rotational motion related to those for linear motion? (HL)
How are the laws of conservation and equations of motion in the context of rotational motion analogous to those governing linear motion? (HL)