Introduction to Physics: Contact Forces and Collisions

This course is designed for small communities of learners and is a hybrid of individualized tutoring and traditional instruction covering middle school science content. Each section has no more than six learners which provide a foundation for strong relationships, social-emotional learning, and truly individualized instruction. These classes are specifically designed for the inclusion of neurodivergent learners including dyslexia-friendly font, explicit executive functioning skills instruction, and support for AAC users and through the use of inquiry and project based learning strategies grounded in real-world context. 
This series is designed according to the Next Generation Science Standards organized by subject area. The focus for this year is on physical science . This curriculum is designed to allow students to develop skills to help them in traditional academic settings including high school or colleges such as note-taking and self-led learning. The class meets two days a week and homework reading, activities, and text-based discussions are completed on two additional weekdays. Students will complete a science notebook, a printable designed by the teacher, using graphic organizers and  traditional note-taking strategies.
In this unit students will explore contact forces, collision, energy and other fundamentals of physics building upon previous studies through the grounded phenomena of dropping a phone or other device as we explore the question" Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other"? We will explore the factors leading into damage, develop free-body diagrams, mathematical models, system models, and explore the work of other scientists to explain relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions. Then they will engineer something to protect a fragile object in a collision and solve design related problems through several sports themed transfer tasks. 
Week 1:  Students will model their initial understanding of collisions by modeling it at several time points and considering both damaging and non-damaging collisions. We will create a driving question board and brainstorm possible investigations. Students will use slow motion videos to observe colliding objects and develop a model about their energy transfer using systems thinking. 
Week 2: Students will expand on their observations and make a claim on whether all objects bend when or deform when they are in a collision and perform testing using household objects to discover the relationship between contact force applied and deformation in different materials. They will create graphs of this information to share with others and develop a model of elastic and inelastic behavior. 
Week 3: Students will explore how changing factors including mass and speed impact the collision through investigations including using their own fingers as force detectors. They will discover Newton's third law and use a model to represent peak forces from a collision in relation to energy. They will be introduced to free body diagrams. Students will complete a transfer task as an assessment applying what they have learned to the sport of Soccer (football) and related injuries. 
Week 4: Learners will carry out an investigation to determine whether doubling the speed or doubling the mass of an object in a collision causes more damage and work through data to quantify. We will develop mathematical models of these relationships and use them to predict and explain collisions. We will also explore how energy moves through out launcher system and further expand our model to cover relational motion. 
Week 5: Students will also conduct independent investigations to discover how other forces impact the collision including friction and air resistance. Learners will explore why some objects do not break in collisions by a transfer task involving baseball bats as a formative assessment. This will launch learners into the second part of our unit exploring how we can create designs to better protect objects in a collision.
Week 6:  We will conduct material tests compare the structure and functions of materials to protect objects and notice similarities. We will create models to explain why some materials are more protective than others and use this to revise our designs. We will determine how designers and engineers develop criteria and concerns for a design through talking with stakeholders and how they use decision matrixes to make decisions. 
Week 7: We will create pitches for our designs and discuss how engineers get support from investors using persuasive writing and presenting skills. Then we will take our final assessment evaluating other engineer's designs for a helmet to protect competitive cheerleaders. We will review the driving question board to see what we've learned.