Bodily motions for energy theater

This is a very short post.  As I was coming back from lunch today, I saw a group from E1 doing energy theater to make sense of the mousetrap car.

What struck me were all the different motions they were doing:  there was hopping up and down with the legs together, there was spinning in place, and there was a kind of jogging in place.  Unfortunately, they were not being taped.  I want to ask them what those different motions represented (i'm used to watching clips of energy theater at AAPT and the teachers in the video using hand signals, such as a K for kinetic energy, or a T for thermal, etc.).  I didn't realize groups did all different kinds of things to represent the different forms of energy.  I was impressed with their creativity.  Maybe they were trying to get some exercise as well after sitting down all morning.  ^_^


Okay, so I asked Joe during a break this afternoon about these motions.  He said hopping up and down with the legs together represented elastic (potential) energy, spinning around (after a lot of group discussion) represented rotational motion or rotational kinetic energy to distinguish from straight (linear) motion (I gather it took them awhile as a group to decide if they wanted to separate out those two different forms), and then jogging in place was just the regular linear motion (he didn't say kinetic energy here but I think that is what he meant, but his language focused on "motion" as opposed to "kinetic energy").