Dr. Panoff talked to the students about taking advantage of opportunities to learn math and science, emphasizing how important these fields are. He pointed out how inaccurate a lot of manufacturing is and how cautious we should be to trust what others tell us is truth.
Dr. Love then proceeded with today's lesson, instructing the class on how to build ramps. Once the ramps were constructed, the students took measurements in order to understand how to predict where the marble would land when rolled down their ramps. The class then took a break from the ramps in order to discuss some of the math behind what they were doing. The discussion included forms of energy, projectile motion, and predicting the the path of the marble. The students used the ProMotion applet to calculate the initial velocity of the marble and to see a graph of its movement.
Finally, the students chose a location to place a cup and calculated the height from which they would have to start the marble in order to get it to land into the cup. Students calculated the slope, final location, velocity, and its expected landing point. They put these calculations into ProMotion and then Data Flyer to make predictions about how the marble would move. After setting up their ramps according to their calculations, the students competed to see who could land in the cup most consistently.
To wrap up the day, the class discussed practical applications of civil engineering, specifically how ground water flows and how pollution is carried through water. The students looked at an aquarium the simulated the movement of ground water. Dr. Love put food coloring into one part of the water, and the students watched it move through layers of soil. After watching the simulation, the students used a java application to simulate on the computer what they already observe. Then the students discussed how they could apply computer science to this model.