Inside the Classroom:
AP Physics Lab Puts Learning in Motion

Step inside Matt Mulholland’s AP Physics class at Zionsville Community High School, and you’ll find more than formulas on a board. On this day, students were fully immersed in a hands-on lab, testing theories, collecting data, and collaborating to make sense of the physics project at hand. Students were curious and worked together to problem-solve as concepts came alive through authentic experiments.

Inside the Classroom AP Physics Mr. Mulholland

Beyond the Collision:
Skills for Life

Where Physics and Motion Intersect

When you walk into Matt Mulholland’s AP Physics class at Zionsville Community High School, you don’t just see equations on a board, you see learning come to life. This time, students huddled over a two-meter track, lining up motorized toy cars, crunching numbers, and testing predictions in real time.

The lab, called “Crash Course,” challenged students to measure the constant velocity of two cars, calculate when and where they’d collide, and then put their math to the test in a head-on crash.

“At its core, physics can be thought of as applied mathematics,” Mulholland explained. “This activity captures that perfectly by giving students a real-world problem to solve and experimentally test.”
ZCHS Educator Matt Mulholland

Beyond the Lecture

Mulholland emphasized that labs like this one aren’t meant to replace lectures, they are an extension of them.

“Hands-on lab activities should complement, build upon, and reinforce the learning students do through class lectures and homework,” he said. "By shifting from theory to practice, students see the concepts in action and feel the stakes rise as they test their predictions."

Lessons that Last

But it wasn’t just formulas and graphs that students remembered. Mulholland noted the nervous energy before the final collision test and the joy that followed success. “Those emotions will stay with them long after they’ve forgotten the specific concepts,” he said.

Students echoed that learning lesson.

“I strengthened my skill in working with position vs. time graphs and how they apply to real-world examples,” shared junior Aden Guerrero.
ZCHS Junior Aden Guerroro

For classmate John Crane, the project connected directly to his dream.

“I plan on pursuing a career in motorsports, so this lab required the same experimental protocols and attention to detail that are required in that industry.”
ZCHS Student John Crane

Skills for the Future

Not every student in the room will become an engineer, but Mulholland believes the skills they practiced will serve them well in any career path. “The specific content is less important than the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that students develop,” he said. “Teaching students how to think is fundamentally more important than what we teach them.”