Connecting Maths and Physics

This morning Room 4 maths explored the connection between maths and physics for our new inquiry topic on Force and Motion. We completed several activities and we had to guess what maths and science theories they might be connected to.

First we completed a challenge where we had to hit a domino from the bottom of the stack. This demonstrated the law of inertia; An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. This meant that the bottom domino moved when we hit it with a ruler, but the other dominoes would not move unless we hit them as well.

We then used our dominoes to make a domino run. We realised that this activity is linked to the law of inertia as well; as soon as the dominoes begin to fall they continue to knock each other over. We tried some different configurations of dominoes and attempted to use some obstacles as well.

We then considered the different forces involved in this activity and we identified one of them as gravity. Our next challenge was to attempt to build the tallest tower that we could with our cups. We started this with our small groups and then realised that we could build an even taller tower if we combined all of our cups.