Video Analysis: Real-World Explorations for Secondary Mathematics.

Secondary math students are often heard to ask these two timeless questions: “When are we ever going to use this?” and “Why do we need to know this?” We must be able to provide satisfactory answers to these questions, because students who fail to realize the relevance of content covered in class are often less successful than those who do see the immediate value of the knowledge. Although many math instructors may struggle to fi nd authentic examples of function and graphing applications that hold the interest of their students, physics instructors like me have long known of numerous applications encountered in studies of motion. Quantities relevant to motion studies include position, time, velocity, acceleration, force, momentum, impulse, and forms of energy. Descriptive quantities for objects moving with constant velocity are generally expressed by linear and/or constant relationships, while accelerating objects are generally described by both linear and quadratic functions. Objects undergoing periodic motion, such as objects rotating or moving in a circular path, yield trigonometric functions when position, velocity, and/or acceleration are plotted with time.