Addicted to playing Angry Birds? Maybe a better question might be, who isn't addicted to the game? And savvy science teachers are capitalizing on the Angry Birds phenomenon by using it to teach physics lessons.
"What are the laws of physics in the Angry Birds world?" John Burk, a ninth-grade physics teacher at the private Westminster Schools in Atlanta, put that question to his students and gave them the chance to "be among the first to find the answer." Burk became interested in using Angry Birds in the classroom last winter, and began blogging about teaching with it. Given that the birds are catapulted into the sky, it was the perfect tool for teaching students the laws of projectile motion. In about 30 minutes, the teens were able to thoroughly understand, as Burk wrote on his blog, "the two big ideas of projectile motion: the horizontal component of motion is constant velocity, while the vertical component is constant acceleration."
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