Helicar
The invention of the aeroplane was the most current and fascinating topic in France in the 1930s, and the urge to apply the new technology everywhere, as in the automobile sector, was great. Propellers, it turns out, are a fairly inconvenient way to propel an automobile.
“I don’t think I fully realized this until I drove this 1932 Helicron and really experienced the raw, instinctive feel of a car that can sometimes barely move…” says Jason Torchinsky, who attempted to drive one.
When you’re not actually making touch with something solid, like the earth, a propeller is amazing, but if I had to pick between pushing the large, hard ground and pushing the nitrogen and oxygen mixture we call air, I’d take the ground every time. Using the accuracy of the BBC micro:bit platform sensors as a springboard for their investigation, participants will experientially explore the concepts of couple forces as they are asked to describe how it is pushed as well as describe one of the most fundamental quantities in kinematics, instantaneous velocity. They will then deal with the concept of equilibrium through the use of pairs of forces, their synthesis, and analysis by replicating Newton’s results on motion.
Expected Learning Outcomes
At the end of the activities students will be able to:
- They define a body’s instantaneous velocity and can define and distinguish it as the distance travelled by a body as a function of the corresponding time.
- Define and compute the component of two or more opposing forces acting in the same direction.
- They explain how to calculate the resultant force when the forces are in opposite directions.
- They describe how force analysis on axes is done.
- Define the equilibrium of a body by stating Newton’s first law and relating it to the forces acting on it.
- They recognise action-reaction scenarios by observing pairs of forces acting on the same or distinct bodies. on it.
Program Information
Class: 2nd High School
Number of courses: 1 course
Duration: 90′
Number of students: the whole class