Is the theater a good place to learn about physics?

It has been this year for students in Martha Hodges-Gritter's fifth-grade class at Wilson Elementary School . Through the Annenberg Center's education department , physics professor Larry Gladney has used stage performances as a springboard for exploring basic principles of physics with the fifth-graders.

On April 11, the Wilson students attended a production of "The Number 14," a comedy about passengers on a cross-town bus. The actors in the play lurch, bump, and even somersault their way across town in response to the bus's motion. Afterwards, Gladney demonstrated the physics behind the motion with a series of experiments involving the students.

One of the concepts covered was that of the "center of gravity" of an object--the reason passengers standing on a bus often lose their balance. Using an action figure and a pen (above), Gladney showed how a large object with a low center of gravity can balance perfectly on a small surface. After the students tried unsuccessfully to roll several objects down a tightrope without the objects falling off, Gladney produced a wheel with counterweights (below). The counterweights lowered the wheel's center of gravity and thus let it roll down the rope without falling off.

The students also used lasers to explore whether it was possible for a person to stand absolutely still (it wasn't) and learned how motion detectors worked by trying to copy a line drawn on a blackboard with a plot drawn by the motion detector on a computer.

This was the second get-together this year for Gladney and the students in Ms. Hodges-Gritter's class. Last fall, after seeing the play "Fish Whiskers" at the Annenberg Center, the students explored ultraviolet light, which was used in the play, with Gladney. The Annenberg Center plans to continue the collaboration with Gladney and a new class of Wilson fifth-graders next year.

Return to Compass Features for April 30, 1996