Thinking about actions to take: Orbits and Satellites

There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:

Try these

• giving time to exploring the idea of a natural motion
• giving physical experiences of motion in a circle
• explicitly modelling the two dimensional motion, if you go that far
• building up to the idea of an orbit, from thrown objects, gradually increasing the launch speed

Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narrative to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Teaching Approaches for some examples of activities.

Avoid these

• conflating the launching of a satellite with is orbiting
• restricting the discussion of satellites to artificial satellites
• centrifugal force

Teacher Tip: These difficulties are distilled from: the research findings; the practice of well-connected teachers with expertise; issues intrinsic to representing the physics well.