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UnitGrades 9 - 12

Android Acceleration Application

Photo shows the tall Freefall amusement park ride at Six Flags Over Georgia where riders are rapidly accelerated due to the forces of gravity. The ride has since been closed and removed.Many engineering designs rely on the understanding of acceleration due to gravity.

In the first of two sequential lessons, students create mobile apps that collect data from an Android device's accelerometer and then store that data to a database. This lesson provides practice with MIT's App Inventor software and culminates with students writing their own apps for measuring acceleration. In the second lesson, students are given an app for an Android device, which measures acceleration.

Lessons and activities in this unit support the teaching of basic engineering education, especially engineering mechanics and program/system design. The computer science-based first lesson engages students to design pseudo-code and real code to address a given problem. Computer software engineers at companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google have used their programming knowledge to design applications for mobile devices, similar to the work students do in this unit. The second lesson, in which students design an experiment to gather and analyze data related to acceleration, fits into the engineering mechanics realm, which serves to bridge the gap between theory and application. Through engineering mechanics, especially the concepts used by mechanical engineers, students can analyze and predict the acceleration and deformation of an object due to forces, also known as stresses. Engineering mechanics is based largely on Newton's laws of motion.

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