Horse-powered lessons for ordinary classrooms
You don’t need horses, a barn, or special equipment. Every lesson below runs on real data we already collected and tools you already have. If your students light up at animals the way ours do, these are for you.
The stride as a periodic function
A trotting horse moves its legs in diagonal pairs, a two-beat rhythm you can hear. Our sensor data turns that rhythm into a signal students can graph, fit, and analyze: amplitude, period, frequency, phase. Then comes the good part. Real horses aren’t metronomes, and the deviations from perfect periodicity are where the science lives. Fits precalculus through calculus, and makes a lovely introduction to data and statistics.
A heartbeat as a differential equation
We recorded a real electrocardiogram from Duque, one of our horses, at a trot. Students model the beating heart with the Van der Pol oscillator, the classic equation for self-sustaining rhythms, and compare their model with the real recording. Built for introductory mathematical modeling, and it extends naturally into differential equations courses.
Ready now, free forever
Everything is collected on our Tools & Lessons hub, with one-click Colab links, slides, worksheets, and data.
The Horse Gait Lab: slides, student worksheet, teacher guide, and answer key, plus the interactive Horse Gait Lab web app that Tucson High School students ran on their own phones. It works in any browser, no installation.
Horse Heartbeats and the Van der Pol Oscillator: model a real equine ECG (recorded from Duque at a trot) with the classic equation for self-sustaining rhythms.
Walk–Trot Phase Models: a gait lesson built on real motion-sensor data, with the full dataset included.
Heart Rate and HRV in Exercise: real heart data from a lunging session, ready for analysis.
The notebooks run free in Google Colab, in any browser. No installation, no accounts to manage, no barn required. The repository is at github.com/equiphysics/education. If you’d like help choosing an example or want something your students need, write to us. We build these to be used.