3-Aut1-H

Outcomes

• Pupils can understand the basic principles of ticker timers
• Pupils can build ticker timer graphs

Starter

• Recap the shapes of distance time graphs and get them to sketch in the back of their books what they think the equivilent velocity time graph might look like. These can be revisited later in the lesson or in the following lesson.

Main Body of Lesson

Introduce the ticker timer and briefly discuss mains frequency leading onto the concept of 50 dots per second and each dot representing 0.02s. To help get pupils using ticker timers quickly simply get them to pull some ticker tape through at:

• Constant speed (not too slow as it makes things tricky later)
• Accelerating
• Decelerating

Have them work in pairs (i.e. to share a ticker timer) but make sure that they have a piece of ticker tape each. Get them to draw a line on the first do and then on the 5th dot after that (it sometimes helps for them to think of it in terms of 5 "dot spaces" i.e. 4 dots between lines). Pupils to then build some graphs (4 pieces is usually fine as it cuts down [no pun intended] on cutting and sticking). A tricky concept for them is what does the y-axis represent and what is the scale. Get them to think about the 0.1s of travel that each strip represents and how a 5cm strip made in 0.1s would be a 50cm strip over 1s. If there is time they can draw idealised representations in their note books with a few words about the timers too.