Students describe what happens when a ball is tossed into the air, experimenting with a ball as needed. They make a graph that shows the height of the ball at different times and discuss what makes the ball come back down. With some help from the teacher, they make a graph showing the speed of the ball over time. They look at the data that has been collected intabular form and as a graph on a coordinate grid. For those graphs that are straight lines, the students try to match the graph by entering and graphing a suitable equation.
Students measure the temperature of boiling water as it cools in a cup.
They make a table showing the temperature at five-minute intervals for an hour. The students also predict what the graph would look like if they continued to collect data for another twelve hours. After collecting data through two or three complete turns of the wheel, they make a graph of time versus height. The students learn that this graph represents a periodic function. Students compare two ways of cooling a glass of soda, adding lots of ice at the beginning or adding one cube at a time at one minute intervals.