Last school year, I had a web link emailed to me entitled “A Dashboard Physics Lesson.”1 The link, created and posted by Dale Basier on his Lab Out Loud blog, illustrates video of a car's speedometer synchronized with video of the road. These two separate video streams are compiled into one video that students can watch and analyze. After seeing this website and video, I decided to create my own dashboard videos to show to my high school physics students. I have produced and synchronized 12 separate dashboard videos, each about 10 minutes in length, driving around the city of Lawrence, KS, and Douglas County, and posted them to a website.2 Each video reflects different types of driving: both positive and negative accelerations and constant speeds. As shown in Fig. 1, I was able to capture speed, distance, and miles per gallon from my dashboard instrumentation. By linking this with a stopwatch, each of these quantities can be graphed with respect to time. I anticipate and hope that teachers will find these useful in their own classrooms, i.e., having physics students watch the videos and create their own motion maps (distance-time, speed-time) for study.
REFERENCES
More information about the equipment and software I used to create the videos can be found on my dashboard video website (Ref. 2).
Vehicle specifications can be found on my dashboard video website (Ref. 2).
Additional information about the GPS devices and software used in the videos can be found on my dashboard video website (Ref. 2).
I used Microsoft Excel, Version 2007, and Logger Pro software, available from Vernier Software and Technology, to create these data tables.
Information about motion maps can be found on various websites or in textbooks. One helpful source is the hyperphysics website (hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mechanics/ motgraph.html#c1), created by C.R. Nave.
