Good practice submission

Inspector Hewitson attended a Road Safety Conference where he was given an input on road safety education by Gregor Steele of SSERC. As a result of this Inspector Hewitson approached SSERC and offerred to give an input to secondary teachers on how they could use equations of motion to illustrate to pupils the practical uses behind learning equations. At the same time a message regarding road safety and the inappropriate use of speed would be re-inforced. Jennie Hargreaves from Lockerbie Academy was interested in the input and made contact with Inspector Hewitson to formulate a teaching plan. A two tier teaching plan was implemented. Firstly Collision Investigators would attend at various secondary schools throughout the Region and give inputs to S5 and S6 pupils on a high profile crash where three young people from the Region were killed as a result of inappropriate speed. They explain to the pupils how the collision happened and the methods used to calculate speeds using maths and physics.Secondly as a result of grant funding from the Royal Society Inspector Hewitson and Mrs Hargreaves were able to purchase various pieces of investigative equipment including scaled vehicles, measuring tapes, laptops etc to instigate a scalled version of an actual collision involving a pedestrian and vehicle.Using the equipment they purchased together with scale plans, witness statements and some mathematical data pupils were asked to work out from the physical evidence left at the ‘scene’ what speed the vehicle was travelling at prior to the collision and the behaviour of the pedestrian prior to the collision. Booklets were supplied to each pupil for them to work out what had happened.A further more complicated scale plan has also been produced which involves a momentum exchange involving two vehicles when pupils are asked to calculate the speed of the vehicles prior to the collision.The Royal Society recognised the worth of this project and invited Police Scotland and Lockerbie Academy to attend at the prestigious Royal Society Summer Exhibition in London where they presented the project to apporximately 15000 attendees including students and teachers, who were given copies of the booklets and advice as to where they could find information about the project on the internet.