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State Standards Correlations (PDF)
National Science Education Standards (NSES)
The Inventing Flight for Schools program specifically addresses national standards for education in the following ways:
• Process Skills Standard: In the course of the program, students observe, infer, manipulate materials, measure, experiment, collect data, record data and interpret data.
• Content Standard: In the course of the program, students learn to understand that laws of motion are used to calculate precisely the effects of forces on the motion of objects. They also learn to understand Newton’s Third Law, whenever one object exerts a force on another, a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction is exerted on the first object.
• Content Standard: In the course of the program, students develop descriptions, explanations, predictions and models using evidence.
In each Inventing Flight for Schools lesson, students base their explanations on what they observed. As they develop cognitive skills, they learn to differentiate explanation from description – providing causes for effects and establishing relationships based on evidence and logical argument.
• Content Standard: In the course of the program, students learn to think critically and logically to make the relationship between evidence and explanations.
Thinking critically about evidence includes deciding what evidence should be used and accounting for anomalous data. Students review data from their simple experiments, summarize the data, and form a logical argument about the cause-and-effect relationships in the experiment.
• Content Standard regarding Motion and Forces: In the course of the program, students learn to understand the following: that the motion of an object can be described by its position, direction of motion, and speed, that this motion can be measured and represented on a graph, that if more than one force acts on an object along a straight line the forces will reinforce or cancel one another depending on their direction and magnitude, and that unbalanced forces will cause changes in the speed or direction of an object’s motion.
• Content Standard regarding Energy: In the course of the program, students learn to understand that energy is a property of many substances and is associated with heat, light, electricity, mechanical motion, sound, nuclei, and the nature of a chemical. Also, all energy can be considered to be either kinetic energy, which is the energy of motion, or potential energy, which depends on relative position (or state).
• Learning Objectives alighed with NSES:
At the end of Unit #1, students should be able to describe and predict the effects of forces on objects and on the motion of objects within a system.
At the end of Unit #2, students should be able to apply knowledge of the interaction of motion and forces to develop descriptions, explanations, and models and to identify cause-and-effect relationships among the forces acting on the wings of airplanes.
At the end of Unit #3, students should be able to apply the idea of energy transformations and discuss the relationship between potential and kinetic energy during flight. In addition, they should be able to apply their understanding of work and power to explain how aspect ratio affects propeller efficiency.
• Assessment:
In the Inventing Flight for Schools program, the three learning Units consist of several lessons that are each divided into two parts: Exploration (an activity) and Explanation (a guided class discussion). First, each activity is assessed on its successful completion. Then, there is an assessment for both Exploration and Explanation sections that consists of specific questions for students to answer either through class discussion or written assignment.
In addition, each Unit ends in both an informal group discussion assessment and an individual written assessment to be completed by each student.
As an expansion assessment, teachers are directed to make connections to broad themes and areas of science through provided questions and research topics to help students develop an understanding of how science impacts society and the world around them.
Finally, at the conclusion of the curriculum, teachers are provided with a Summative Assessment project that asks students to write a creative, problem-solving essay with illustrations.
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