In a Montessori preschool classroom, students work independently on tasks that absorb their attention in part because the apparatus are carefully designed to make mistakes directly observable and limit exploration to one aspect or dimension. Control of error inheres in the apparatus itself, so that teacher intervention can be minimal.1 Inspired by this example, I created a robotic kinematics apparatus that also shapes the inquiry experience. Students program the robot by drawing kinematic graphs on a computer and then observe its motion. Exploration is at once limited to constant velocity and constant acceleration motion, yet open to complex multi-segment examples difficult to achieve in the lab in other ways. The robot precisely and reliably produces the motion described by the students' graphs, so that the apparatus itself provides immediate visual feedback about whether their understanding is correct as they are free to explore within the hard-coded limits. In particular, the kinematic robot enables hands-on study of multi-segment constant velocity situations, which lays a far stronger foundation for the study of accelerated motion. When correction is anonymous—just between one group of lab partners and their robot—students using the kinematic robot tend to flow right back to work because they view the correction as an integral part of the inquiry learning process. By contrast, when correction occurs by the teacher and/or in public (e.g., returning a graded assignment or pointing out student misconceptions during class), students all too often treat the event as the endpoint to inquiry. Furthermore, quantitative evidence shows a large gain from pre-test to post-test scores using the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K).
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
April 2015
PAPERS|
April 01 2015
The Maiden Voyage of a Kinematics Robot
Matthew L. Greenwolfe
Matthew L. Greenwolfe
Cary Academy
, Cary NC
Search for other works by this author on:
Phys. Teach. 53, 205–209 (2015)
Citation
Matthew L. Greenwolfe; The Maiden Voyage of a Kinematics Robot. Phys. Teach. 1 April 2015; 53 (4): 205–209. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4914557
Download citation file:
Pay-Per-View Access
$40.00
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
Citing articles via
A “Perpetual Motion Machine” Powered by Electromagnetism
Hollis Williams
Sauntering Sauropods: The Preferred Walking Speeds of the Largest Land Animals That Ever Lived
Scott A. Lee, Justyna Slowiak
Jack Reacher and the Deployment of an Airbag
Gregory A. DiLisi, Richard A. Rarick
Related Content
Kinematics with robot cars
The Physics Teacher (December 2015)
By Hook or by MOOC: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead
The Physics Teacher (March 2017)
The ROCKOT vehicle qualified for commercial launches
AIP Conference Proceedings (February 2001)
A Modular Approach for Trajectory Generation in Biped Robots
AIP Conference Proceedings (September 2011)
Tests of the DO/ calorimeter response in 2–150 GeV beams
AIP Conference Proceedings (February 1992)