Gaitway to Acceleration: Walking Your Way to Acceleration
Collecting gait data.Copyright 2014 Jeremy Scheffler, University of Nebraska Omaha
Student teams use sensors—motion detectors and accelerometers—to collect walking gait data from group members. They import their collected position and acceleration data into Excel® for graphing and analysis to discover the relationships between position, velocity and acceleration in the walking gaits. Then they apply their understanding of slopes of secant lines and Riemann sums to generate and graph additional data. These activities provide practice in the data collection and analysis of systems, similar to the work of real-world engineers.
Engineers analyze systems that they want to maintain or change. For instance, an environmental engineer might wonder why a natural system is becoming unstable. A software engineer might analyze how a particular software application behaves when it is given unorthodox input. A mechanical engineer might analyze why a system has an unexpected energy loss. Through the engineering design process, engineers collect data about systems and analyze that data. This activity provides a hands-on laboratory experience in which students collect data and then analyze it to determine relationships between the data variables.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Collect data and analyze it to determine relationships between the variables.
- Explain the relationships between position, velocity and acceleration.
- Given a velocity vs. time graph, produce corresponding position and acceleration graphs.
- Given an acceleration vs. time graph, produce corresponding velocity and position graphs.