Assessment 1.3

8th Grade Assessment 1.3 Plan

Teacher Directions

Student Document 1.3

Student Document

Asteroid Data Worksheet

Assessment 1.3 Part 1 - Document 1

Students collect data on actual asteroids. The two tricky things about this is that this is a constantly updating database to the information changes. Second, since scale differs greatly, I restrict the asteroids I have my students use for each section. There are directions to narrow down the field of asteroids, as well as links to asteroids they can just use.

Graphing the Asteroid Data

Assessment 1.3 Part 1 - Document 2

Students graph the data and look for patterns. The main difficulty is that the scale of the asteroids is not constant. In the same set of data they might have an asteroid that has an energy of 1.0x10^-2 and 1.0x10^0. They need to adjust their data to make the scale the same. There is a video to help with this.

Skate Park Calculations

Supplemental - Skatepark Calculations

Students explore the idea of conservation of energy by looking at a PhET simulation of a girl on a skateboard. Then they practice a couple of simple calculations, which will help support the calculations in Part 3.

Asteroid Drop Investigation

Assessment 1.3 Part 2 - Asteroid Drop Investigation

Students drop different massed balls into flour investigating the relationship between energy (measured by crater characteristics) and mass. We used to do a less structured lab (link), but felt like our students were not benefiting from that format for this lab. Our plan is to change this to a different activity next year, the investigation does get usable data, but is messy and we think a different activity could be more interesting.

Kinetic and Potential Energy Calculations

Assessment 1.3 Part 3 - Energy Calculations

Students use the equations for kinetic and potential energy to calculate how energy and velocity change for a falling object. They graph this data and look for patterns.

Methods to Prevent Asteroid Impacts

Assessment 1.3 PArt 4 - Methods to Prevent Asteroid Impacts

Students are given a scenario (in the student directions) and a document with methods to prevent asteroid impacts. They have to read through the proposals, pick the one they think is best, explain why they picked it, and how it uses forces to prevent the impact.

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