written by Anne Cox and Wolfgang Christian

Videos of Angry Birds, roller coasters and shark breaches are all opportunities to teach physics. In video analysis, students see physics in action as they collect kinematic data from these videos, creating graphs of velocity, acceleration, energy and momentum. Video modeling takes this one step further by combining videos with computational modeling. Here students apply a dynamic model to the video in an attempt to fit the motion observed.  In this workshop, participants will use Tracker, a free, open-source video analysis and modeling tool, to analyze videos for use in the physics classroom. Tracker and ready-to-run curricular materials are available from the Open Source Physics Collection of the National Science Foundation funded ComPADRE National Science Digital Library at: http://www.compadre.org/osp/.

• Download Modeling What You See with Tracker.pdf - 696kb Adobe PDF Document

Last Modified June 25, 2012