Summary: A SHAWCO SMART lesson for Grade 10
A cyclist rides at 20 km/h for 40 km, and then rides at 40 km/h for the next 20 km. What is the cyclist’s average speed for the whole journey?
Start by asking the learners how tall they think a person is (in meters or cm, avoid using feet and inches). Go round your group and let everybody give an answer. Ask them to vote on the most reasonable answer. Then use a ruler to measure how tall an ordinary-height person is. See if the answer is close to the answer that they guessed. Then do the same for the length of a hand.
Ask the learners what we were measuring. (Distance) Ask them what units we can use for measuring distance. Get as many answers as they can come up with. (Include non-metric units). Make sure they include km, m, cm and mm. Once you have a whole list (maybe write it down somewhere so they can see) say that for school they will only need those four.
Ask them what the standard unit for measuring distance is. (m) Now ask individual people how many km’s, cm’s and mm’s go into a metre. Don’t be harsh if they don’t know, just ask someone else.
The useful to remember units goes like this:
King Henry died a Miserable death Called Measles
kilometre metre centimetre millimetre
It goes down in powers of 10. Ask them to learn it or make up their own one. They only need to know km, m, cm and mm, so tell them that the other words are just place-holders. Make sure that they notice all the words end in “metre” just with a different prefix. Show them how to use it to work out that a kilometre is 1000 times bigger then a metre, a metre is 100 times bigger than a centimetre and a centimetre is 10 times bigger than a millimetre.
For example:
Now ask them what the standard unit for measuring time is. (seconds). Ask them how many seconds are in a minute and how many minutes are in an hour. Then ask them if they can figure out how many seconds in an hour.
See if anybody can give you a precise definition of speed. (Speed is a ratio of distance and time, or speed is distance divided by time, they must know both.) Using this definition, ask them what the standard unit for speed is (m/s). Ask for another unit of speed (km/hour). Work through an example of converting 10m/s to km/hour. (10 m/s = 600 m/min = 36 000 m/hour = 36 km/hour). It’s is easy we think of it as a fraction as such.
Make sure that they understand each step so that they will be able to convert any units. Ask them what a normal speed for a car should be, in built up areas. (60 km/hour). To test them ask them to convert this to km/hour.
Ask them if they know what average speed means. Give them the example of walking to school in the morning and ask them how they would go about calculating their average speed. They would first have to estimate the distance and then estimate the time taken. Then use the following equation
Average speed = (distance travelled) ÷ (time taken)
Ask them what this number means. (It is the speed at which the learner walk if she walked at a constant speed, i.e. without stopping of running)
The standard units used in science are called SI units. This means that for distance there is only one SI unit (metres). The same goes for time (seconds) and speed (metres per second (m/s)). See if the learners know of any others such as force (newtons (N)), acceleration (metres per second per second (m/s2)) and momentum (kilogram metres per second (kg.m/s)).
We know that speed = distance ÷ time. Rearranging this equation we find that time = distance ÷ speed. Using this we know that the first 40 km takes
(40km ÷ 20km/h) = 2 hours
and the next 20 km takes
(20km ÷ 40km/h) = ½ hour.
So the cyclist rides 60 km in 2 ½ hours, for an average speed of
(60km ÷ 2 ½hours) = 24 km/h.
8 m/s = 480 m/min = 28 800 m/h = 28,8 km/h.
180 km/h = 30 km/min = 0,5 km/s = 500 m/s.