This is what the motion sensor looks like. It connects to a Mac or PC computer
via a USB cable. It can detect how far away something is in 'meters' that is
directly in front of it.
When you run EZ-Screen software you will get a graph that looks like
what you see below. This graph has position on the Y-axis (up and down)
and time in seconds along the X-axis (left to right). So the farther up you go the farther
you are from the sensor. The graph starts at zero on the left and ends at 10 seconds.
Ez-Screen has a little game that you can play with this motion sensor. Which helps one understand
kinesthetically what the graph and sensor are doing. The software lets you pick you a graph that
you have to try to "match" by moving back and forth in front of the sensor. In this case the graph
picked is the blue one. The red line is a recording of how I moved. I got a score of 82.9.
The more accurately your motions follow the blue line the higher your score.
So you can see by the graph that when you start you need to be about .5 meters in front of the sensor.
Then you need to stay that way for about 1.5 seconds. After that the blue slopes upward, meaning that
you need to move away from the sensor at even speed until you are about 1.5 meters away from the sensor.
But you get no rest because you will notice the blue line then slopes down at the same speed, so you have
step forward... The EZ=Screen give you instant feedback about where you are as the red line is drawn out
on the screen. Its very neat and students start to understand immediately what this graph means.
Pasco provides various lesson materials around this experiment for which the teacher can use
to reinforce this activity.