Horse-Powered Lessons for Ordinary Classrooms
You don’t need horses, a barn, or any special equipment to teach with EquiPhysics materials. Every example below runs on real, already-collected data and standard classroom tools. If your students light up at animals the way ours do, these lessons 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; also a lovely introduction to data and statistics.
A heartbeat as a differential equation
We recorded a real electrocardiogram from Duque, one of our program 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 against the real recording. Built for introductory mathematical modeling; extends naturally into differential equations courses.
Ready now, free forever
Our open education repository at github.com/equiphysics/education already includes complete classroom labs:
The Horse Gait Lab — slides, student worksheet, teacher guide, and answer key, plus the interactive gait web app at equiphysics.github.io/web-apps 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. If you’d like help choosing an example or want something your students need, write to us. We build these to be used.