In this activity, students use Direct Measurement Videos to learn science concepts. Students are assigned a specific video and are asked to develop a question that can be answered using the information they can glean from the video. Students try to develop a particularly difficult and interesting question that they can solve, and challenge other students to be able to solve it as well.

In this lesson students will learn about displacement, velocity, and acceleration based on the science from the movies "October Sky" and "Harry Potter". Students will also learn about gravity and projectile motion.

In this activity, students are challenged to find the speed of a battery-powered car. Students will devise their own procedure to measure distance and time and calculate speed over several trials. Students will generate a complete lab write-up to summarize the lab.

This is a short activity intended to allow students to practice kinematics using a video of a familiar object: a spring-powered toy car. Students measure displacement and elapsed time from the video and use these measurements to calculate average speed. Observing that the car has an initial speed of zero, students can find the final speed and acceleration. Students will use a QuickTime video recorded at 240 frames per second, making measurements directly from the video using a ruler and a frame-counter overlaid on the video.

In this lab activity, students are given a curved ramp and a sphere which is rolled down the ramp until it leaves the edge of the lab table horizontally and then are asked to predict where the sphere will land by making measurements and completing calculations.

This is a PBL project that used the "Lord of the Rings" book/film as the basis for a study of kinematics. It was specifically designed to help students increase their depth of knowledge for one-dimensional motion and two-dimensional projectile motion so that they could successfully fend off a hypothetical attack of the ork army. The project also allowed students to build a working catapult or trebuchet. Note that the project was designed and delivered per the North Carolina honors Physics curriculum and it can be customized to meet your own specific curriculum needs and resources.