IA time again

I have just started the IA with my students. I mean the DP1 students of course, the DP2's investigations were submitted some weeks ago. My second year students told me the other day that their IA in physics was by far the best IA experience they had, the reason being that I give a lot of class time over for it (3 weeks) and I limit it to a short time. Many subjects do their IA over many months, I get 1st draft after just 3 weeks and final draft in 5.

As usual I will report on the process here. Right now they are deriving research questions, I am thinking of videoing some of my conversation where I take them from a vague idea to a focused research question. It might be interesting.

So far I have one student investigating the spring constant of a nichrome wire spring at different temperatures. The temperature will be varied by passing current through the wire and the temperature determined from the wire's resistance. The student originally wanted to investigate the relationship between the frequency and temperature of a wire but we focussed in on this simpler but related research. Another wanted to investigate the bounce off a tennis racket but we simplified this to the bounce off a single stretched wire (a sonometer). He will using a small cylindrical mass falling onto the wire through a glass tube to investigate the relationship between tension and bounce height. Another one is investigating the speed of a longitudinal wave in a slinky and the distance between the loops and that's all that I can remember for now.