My name is Joe Taylor. I have been a member of this list for some time now
but have posted only a few times. I am a former high school physics teacher
who now teaches a physics course for elementary education majors at Penn
State University. In this course we try to deal with physics issues and
concepts that our future teachers are likely to teach in the upper
elementary grades. As a result, one of the units in the course is on Simple
Machines. This semester is the third time that I have taught the Simple
Machines unit and with each passing semester I grow more and more convinced
that simple machines provide a very meaningful context for the discussion
of important physics concepts. Our simple machines discussions have taken
us into issues such as work, conservation of energy, equilibrium, torque,
friction, moment of inertia, vectors, and others.
Being relatively new to the game - I've been teaching physics for 7 years
now, I never saw the "hey day" of simple machines. I was wondering if some
of our senior members could provide some historical perspective on simple
machines. How and why did they fall from grace (and out of most high school
physics curricula)?