The end of Earth and Cosmos has seen us finalise our collaborative Inquiry on Motion. Students investigated soft landing technologies and applied this knowledge to creating and testing their own variation – commonly parachutes! Digital technology options such as the software ‘Tracker’ were employed to analyse the motion and the rate of change in velocity or acceleration of their objects. This folded very nicely into the equations of motion and the maths learning we have been doing, analysing the velocity graphs to determine how impactful the varying soft-landing technologies were.
Week 6 allowed us to have a bit of fun with activities linked to EaC semester of learning. Students selected activities they wished to engage in aligned to maths, cultural science, science fiction or physics. For example, we looked at force application in terms of Newton’s laws and trajectories using water rockets in preparation for physics. Other options included investigating how much a role the Universe played in influencing Indigenous cultures, particularly the use of constellations or dark areas to influence seasonal knowledge and the impact of these universal objects on people’s views of the world and belief systems. Students who were interested in challenging themselves in mathematical learning undertook options to explore optimisation and/or tangents and normals, setting themselves up for maths learning in Year 12.
It has been a great semester for EaC, with lots of really interconnected and authentic uses of the curricular areas aligned to our Big Idea, we hope the students have enjoyed it as much as the teachers!
