When we begin our unit on rotational dynamics, should we expect students to understand angular speed and angular acceleration without any prior experience or intuition? In this article, I describe a lab in which students are instructed to spin with different angular speeds, or angular frequencies, and in different units such as rad/s, rpms, and Hz or cps. I have found that after having students perform these spins, they have a better grasp of radians per second as a unit of angular speed and how it compares with Hz or rpms. Going further, this article also includes tips for using mobile phone apps to get more accurate measurements.
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