Tatsumi Yanaba

Senior Paige Smith enjoys swinging near the end of class seventh hour in Ellen Wilke’s classroom.

On Dec. 4, during seventh hour AP Physics in Ellen Wilke’s classroom, a yellow swing was chained from the ceiling.

During the previous class, the students had talked about making use of the metal beams on the ceiling, which are new from the renovations.

“All the new physical science rooms have a grid of unistrut beams installed in the ceiling at the front of each lab. The beams are there to hang equipment like large pulleys that we used to hang from hooks in the ceiling,” Wilke said.

Senior Paige Smith suggested hanging a swing.

“I’m not totally sure why I thought of the swing but we had one at my house so I brought it in,” Smith said.

Wilke named this lab the Human Pendulum Lab and decided it would be useful for her honors class’ unit on simple harmonic motion.

“It’s great! I took some video that I will download into some software to try doing a video analysis of the Human Pendulum’s motion,” Wilke said.

The swing was hung at the end of class seventh hour for 15 minutes and students were able to swing. Wilke’s fourth hour AP Physics class did not have the opportunity to try out the swing.

“I was disappointed because I saw pictures of the seventh hour class using it and I was expecting us to do the same in our next class,” senior Tim Hu said.

Currently, fourth hour is hoping to bring something of theirs to enjoy during a class next semester.