Play-Doh and Pendulums: Making Mass Moment of Inertia Fun
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Statics is commonly the first engineering class students take. The version of statics taught at this university ends with a final lecture on mass moment of inertia. This is a segue to dynamics and strength of materials, two classes the students take the following semester. Through the years, students have noted on end of the semester course evaluations mass moment of inertia is a topic of confusion. The goal of this study is to determine if two hands-on activities demonstrating the concept of mass moment of inertia would improve the student's understanding of the topics. Three classes (two control classes, one experimental class) of statics students completed the study. The experimental class completed the hands-on activities and the control class continued with the general lecture. For the first activity teams of students were provided a simple pendulum. Students added objects of various masses and shapes to the rod of the pendulum. Students made observations about the change in swinging motion as the objects changed. The second activity used Play-Doh to help the students visualize how to use both shell and disk elements for integrating. The control students learned the material in a traditional lecture setting. The next class, all students completed a four-question concept quiz to determine their understanding of mass moment of inertia. A t-test was used to compare groups. Additionally, the experimental class completed a survey to assess learning objectives related to curiosity and making connections. There was no significant difference in scores between the two groups, suggesting the hands-on activity did not increase learning. The pendulum activity was more well received than the Play-Doh activity by the students. Although there was no difference, engagement was improved and no additional time was necessary. In the future, all sections of statics will implement the pendulum activity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".