Students will be working in groups, racing (pushing) Hot Wheels cars of varying sizes up a ramp and letting it fall back to the starting point. When the cars are pushed up a ramp, at some point, they will stop moving forward and begin to roll back to the ground; this relationship between the position of the cart and the time elapsed is representational of the quadratic equation in general form.

In this activity students will be conducting an experiment and collecting data to find what the quadratic equation will be to represent them pushing their car up the ramp and it returning back to the ground.

This activity is aligned with the following Common Core State Standards:

• MATH.CONTENT.HSF.IF.C.7: Graph functions expressed symbolically and show key features of the graph, by hand in simple cases and using technology for more complicated cases.
• MATH.CONTENT.HSF.BF.A.1.A: Combine standard function types using arithmetic operations. For example, build a function that models the temperature of a cooling body by adding a constant function to a decaying exponential, and related these functions to a model.

For this activity students will use a Motion Detector to measure the position of the car on the ramp along with the change in time. The students will collect this data and analyze it to look for key locations on the parabolic curve so that they can write an appropriate quadratic equation for their particular car rolling up and down the ramp.

 

Activity:hot-wheels-and-parabolas

Resources: https://www.vernier.com