I always feel sorry for my 1st period class. I did this lesson with all four of my classes, and of course it got better as the day went on. The graphs also helped them find the numbers they needed when going from shooting from the floor to shooting from the desk. This was a great visual check for them to make sure their equations matched their data before moving on. *I made a Desmos Teacher Activity for students to record their data and then enter the equations that they created from their data. No one may shoot from the desk until all groups are finished, then we ALL gather around and watch each group shoot, one at a time.After they find the time the candy will be in flight, they use proportional reasoning to calculate where to place the target.They measure the height of a desk and use their equation and Desmos* to find out how long it will take their candy to hit the floor from the desk.We used -490 cm/sec as the dilation since we measured in cm. They use this data to create a quadratic equation of the candy’s flight (in factored form).I tell them to practice and make sure they are getting accurate results. Students used their smartphones to time the flights. Students shoot the catapult from the floor and time how long it takes for the candy to hit the ground and the distance their candy travels.In groups of 3 or 4, instruct students to carefully read their handout.This makes it a projectile motion problem, and then they can use -4.9 meters/sec for the a. After reading Mimi’s comment on Sean’s post I amended Sean’s instructional worksheet ( Candy Catapult Worksheet) to have the students do all of the quadratics work with just the time. This activity follows my projectile motion lesson, which will be very helpful for your students to do before Candy Catapult so they understand what the dilation should be and where it is coming from. My students call this the Starburst Catapult activity and many said it was their favorite activity of the year. But students did have to create a tape basket for the shooter since the Starbursts were smaller and were falling through. If you want to save time, the catapults were only $7.89 from Amazon and worked great! I used Starbursts instead of the included balls (candy for the win). Luckily, our math department already had some catapults that I was able to use. You should definitely shoot candy when you cover projectile motion in Algebra! I got this fun idea from Sean, who even had his students build their own catapults! He’s a rock star.
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