Activities in which students determine the half-life of a substance using M&Ms, solve a crime using chromatography, and calculate the speed of a toy car are presented. The activities include the topic, an introduction, the time needed, a list of materials, safety precautions, procedure, analysis questions, and teacher's notes. (KR)

Describes an activity to determine whether the length of the yellow (warning) signal of a traffic light provides adequate time to stop or pass through the intersection. Discusses the necessary equations, mathematics, and subsequent graphs. (MVL)

Describes a hands-on activity in which the student's task is to design testing procedures and use appropriate formulas to meet the objectives of a two-dimensional projectile motion lab. (ZWH)

Three experiments examined 4- and 6-month-olds' sensitivity to the unity of a partly occluded moving rod undergoing translation, rotation, or oscillation. Findings suggested that all types of common motion were not equivalent for specifying infants' perceptions of occluded objects. (Author)

Presents the equations of motion governing the trajectory of a cricket ball subject to a linear drag force. Uses a perturbation expansion technique to solve the resulting trajectory equation for the range of a cricket ball struck into the outfield. (Author/ASK)

Addresses the relationship between car speed and the safe distance between cars in a linear flow of traffic. (WRM)

Describes a laboratory activity in which students speculate about the extent to which Galileo actually performed an experiment to determine that all pendulums of a given length have the same period, independent of amplitude. (WRM)

Numerous federal and health-promotion agencies recommend increasing youngsters' physical activity levels to 30 to 60 accumulated minutes daily. The National Association for Sports and Physical Education has developed national standards that define a physically educated person. High-quality program components and learning activities are described.…

Presents an activity in which students work in cooperative groups and roll balls down inclined planes, collect data with the help of an electronic motion detector, and represent data with a graphing calculator to explore concepts such as mass, gravity, velocity, and acceleration. (Contains 12 references.) (Author/ASK)

Examined whether infants believe that size of a moving object striking a stationary object will affect how far the stationary object is displaced. Found that the infants did believe the size of the test cylinder affected the length of the test object's displacement and that they used the initial familiarization event to calibrate their predictions…

Examined influence of child's sex on mothers' expectations about their 11-month-olds' motor development. Found that mothers of girls underestimated their performance on the novel task of crawling down steep and shallow slopes and mothers of boys overestimated their performance. Girls and boys exhibited identical levels of motor performance during…

While it is most often the case that an understanding of physics can simplify mathematical calculations, occasionally mathematical precision leads directly to a better physical understanding of a situation. Presents an example of a mechanics problem in which careful mathematical derivation can lead directly to a deeper physical understanding of…

Explains why one orientation of an asymmetric spring-and-mass system leads to a higher frequency of 0000000000 than another orientation. (WRM)

Explains the shape distortions that take place in fluid packets (bubbles or drops) with steady flow motion by using the laws of Archimedes, Pascal, and Bernoulli rather than advanced vector calculus. (WRM)

Presents the physical assumptions and mathematical expressions necessary to derive a fourth-order differential equation that describes the vibration of a particular car antenna. Contends that while students may not be able to derive or use the equation, they should be able to appreciate a guided derivation as an example of how physics is done.…