Interactive: Live Distance-Time Graph Creator

For a recent gifted and talented session I ran, I created This Excel File, which creates a distance time graph live. I gave pupils a pre-made distance time graph and pupils had to recreate it by walking across the room. I used it last week and it worked really great; pupils loved getting up and trying to time their movement. I'm sure it could be used in plenty of other ways too.

 

Setting up the room

• Make a clear path along the length of the room.
• Lay strips of tape in parallel lines spaced one meter apart across the length of the path.

Using the file

Open the file and click 'Enable Content' at the top.

Sheet1 - Creating the distance time graph

• Press reset to delete old values and set the view.
• The 'S' Column contains the timing of the 'Original' line. Change these for a different target graph. (Edit: Times have to be written in this format to work - hh:mm:ss)
• The 'T' Column contains the distance values that are shared between the 'Original' graph and the pupil graph. Change these if your room is a different size.
• Press prime to activate the distance time graph creator.
• Once primed, press enter (on the numeric keypad) every time the student steps across each line of tape, and a new point on the graph will created. (Note: first point created is at (0,0) and also starts the timer)

Sheet 2 - Working out speed
 

• 'View' sets the view
• Each button below this creates the triangles needed to calculate average speeds, but currently must be clicked in order (from top to bottom) for them to work. I will fix this eventually; at the moment the file is limited to my one use session, but I'd love to expand this to be a more multi-purpose graphing tool.