Buoys and Springs--Building Connections between Math and Physics.

Students often tend to compartmentalize material learned in school. While we see this phenomenon within our own classes, it is even more apparent that students have difficulty making connections between their math and physics courses. We believe that hands-on experiments are particularly useful in helping students make these connections. In this paper we present several possible experiments that use buoyancy to help students grasp both the similarities between different forces and the physical interpretation of the integration and differentiation techniques learned in their math classes. These experiments can also be used to introduce computational methods and 3D printing.