The web page which describes what happened to Wendy Layton is at
http://www.aphrodigitaliac.com/mm/archive/wendy/
and the picture of her surviving the crash is at
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~lorenz/spring99/project1/davisone.html
The problem for you is whether, as a consumer, you should believe the stuff which is in the ad, or whether you should view the survival of the Saturn driver in this wreck as being simply lucky. Hint: use energy chains.
While we introduced this problem in the second class day, we really didn't get to it until Feb. 27. It served to focus student learning for part 1 of the course.
This problem introduced the concept of energy and energy chains. See notes and activities for Feb. 6.
The problem is one of the activities in the following book, which is available on-line:
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/evolution98/
The specific set of footprints is at the following site, which you will need to access using Adobe Acrobat (which you can download free, and which is or should be at all the University web sites):
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/evolution98/page89.pdf
What we spent much of Feb 8, 13, and 15 on was not the question in the evolution book, but was the question of the motion of the two different creatures. On Feb. 13 you were given some additional information on their motion. It was not until Feb. 15 that we asked what happened.
This was dealt with on Feb. 20 and 22. A cart, with a little doll of YouDee on it, was set in motion by the instructor and crashed into a barrier. The cart stopped, and when the demonstration was done well, YouDee kept flying in the same direction that the cart was moving.
We then returned to the Saturn Survival Problem.
Other activities related to this question included Balls and Ramps (in discussion section), exploring motion at a constant speed (in laboratory), and exploring accelerated motion (in laboratory).
Follow-up to the Saturn Survival Problem: an addition
The last question I asked the groups to answer (see the activities webpage) was whether the Saturn story, by itself, was enough to convince you that the Saturn automobile was an exceptionally safe car.
Many of you pointed out, quite correctly, that one story cannot by itself prove very much and that the ad left a lot of questions unanswered. What are other cars like? What would happen in a side impact? 31 out of 36 groups expressed the viewpoint summarized in this paragraph. Many of you are using scientific habits of mind to approach this problem - evidently this course or previous courses have had some impact.
The April 2001 issue of Consumer Reports has a report on cars which answers quite a few of these questions. It turns out that most cars have crumple zones in them. It also turns out that most models of Saturns ranked higher in the front crash tests (the situation depicted in the ad) than in the side crash tests. My own conclusion is that while the Saturn is certainly an O.K. car from a safety viewpoint, it is not exceptional.
Whom should you trust? A few web sites which have some information
Consumer Reports has published a magazine essentially forever (actually since 1936, which is ancient history even for me), and when their work deals with things that can be measured reasonably objectively, they are comprehensive and trustworthy. Their magazine accepts no ads. It was the latest issue on cars (dated April 2001, mailed to me in early March 2001) that prompted this addition to the Saturn problem. They have a web site (http://www.ConsumerReports.org/ which has access to a lot of good stuff, though you have to be a subscriber in order to gain access to most of it.
J.D. Power and associates is a company which does a lot of information gathering and has a reputation for reliability. Their website, (http://www.jdpower.com/) , can give you access to a ranking of car safety statistics without being a subscriber.
ConsumerReview (http://www.consumerreview.com/ ) is basically an unedited collection of stories from various people. You have to read them all and figure out what they mean.
If you really want access to the original statistics on car crashes, Consumer Reports lists the following websites, which I have not checked as to their user-friendliness, but which should be reasonably authoritative and unbiased:
www.nhtsa.dot.gov is the website for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Government.
www.iihs.org is the website for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an insurance company group. While they certainly reflect the perspectives of the insurance industry, this source should not be biased towards or away from any particular model of car.
The Big Electricity Problem focuses this part of the course. It is:
You move into an apartment with your roommates and put refrigerator, a fan, a hot plate, and other electrical appliances in the apartment. One roommate goes into the bathroom, blow dries her hair, and blow dryer stops. Her hair is almost dry and she's late to a hot date so she leaves. You come home 2 hours later and notice that the lights on the side of your living room nearest the bathroom are all out and that the refrigerator is not on. The ice cream is melted all over the floor and the food is starting to smell.
Questions related to this problem:
What happened? Why? How can you adjust things in your apartment so it doesn't happen again?
Overall issue: Can you UNDERSTAND what is going on so that you really UNDERSTAND how electricity works in your apartment?
Identify several learning issues which are important to your group's understanding of how the electricity works in your apartment.
How can one shop sensibly for pain relievers? (Discussion section)
How can we classify matter, starting with the things you see in the classroom?
How do chemicals react with each other? Why did they react in the way that they did in the Pringles can?
How and why was nylon invented?
Should Craig Venter and Francis Collins, leaders of the two projects which decoded the Human Genome, be awarded the William Gates award for scientific achievement? Or should the ethical concerns about what we will do with the information and technologies related to research on human and other genomes make this award premature?
(The class consensus was that they should get the prize. About ten days after this class, Craig Venter actually did receive the Common Wealth Award, presented at UD's Biotechnology Resource Center on April 28th. )
We did have a Big Problem which introduced this topic: Why does the moon show phases? A detailed description of this topic is given on the lunar log web page (lunarlog.htm).
Several other problem-based activities were designed to give students an overall conception of the vast size of the Universe. These included the "planet walk" (for a detailed description of the University's Scale Model Solar System, see http://www.museums.udel.edu/art/info/planets.html ). I also showed the famous "Powers of Ten" video.
A short teaching sequences, introduced a more multicultural approach towards understanding the Universe. The problem in this sequence was whether the Polynesian Wayfinding should or should not be considered science. Two web pages which are relevant to this problem are wayfinding.htm and overheadstar.htm