A Bundle of Phyz: FLUIDS

When the College Board added fluids to the AP Physics B exam, I felt like I needed to create a new unit from whole cloth. This bundle includes most of what I subsequently produced over the years.

We begin with pressure and its idiosyncrasies, addressed in a springboard (guided classroom discussion) and a job (independent homework). Next we dive into PhET's Density pool in our first sink-or-float lab activity, "Pool Cubes 1 - Density."

Conceptual Physics Alive's telling of fluids begins with "Liquids I," in which he demonstrates principles using Pascal's vases, among other things.

We move on to buoyancy wi another springboard and job combination. this time it's two of each. Archimedes, Jim, and Huck get in on the action on this topic.

Hewitt continues with "Liquids II" to deepen the buoyancy plot with some thought-provokers and demonstrations.

Moving on to continuity, we get a springboard and a lab springboard that allowed me to derive value from my classroom's eyewash.

Next we return to Hewitt for his lecture on "Gases" that includes some nice demos and conceptual stumpers.

But it wouldn't be College Board suitable if we didn't have a lesson of the Bernoulli Equation. This is a gentle derivation that constructs the equation one term at a time.

And alas, Torricelli. The College Board (and others) love them some leaky buckets. So we use the Bernoulli Equation and kinematics to derive Torricelli's Law. I wonder if Torricelli is the reason fluids is moving from AP Physics 2 to AP Physics 1.

For dessert, we have Jearl Walker's Kinetic Karnival. The episode is "Fluid Flow and Friction," and it begins with Jearl and a rubber duckie in a bubble bath. Beer and cigarettes are shown, in case those represent red flags for you.

A Bundle of Phyz: FLUIDS at Teachers Pay Teachers

All resources are available separately. All are print-friendly Google Docs files on Google Drive. And all come with answer keys.

Pool Cubes 2 - Buoyancy will be added to this bundle shortly after the HTML5 version of PhET's Buoyancy sim is released.

I'm sure there's a story regarding why David Goodstein's Mechanical Universe omitted fluids from its otherwise comprehensive 52-episode course. But I do not know it. Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein get a lot of love. Fluids (Bernoulli, et. al.), nothing.