As a physics teacher, I draw a lot of kinematics graphs. And recently, I’ve been subtlety cueing students with color: position graphs are drawn with red curves, velocity graphs are drawn in blue, and acceleration graphs are drawn in orange.

I do this to improve outcomes. By making it easy to do the right thing, students will show me their thinking with fewer silly mistakes on their part and fewer trick questions on mine.

The color coding can be used anywhere, from paper to the whiteboard. My choice of the color set was borne from whiteboard marker availability (I use Pilot V Board Master markers) and wanting to support those with red/green colorblindness.

This is a slow process that involves updating old graphs. Things are going much faster because I made these kinematics graph templates. I’ve licensed them using Creative Commons and shared them. If you use the templates, I ask you to please give credit to me as creator, only use them non-commercially, and share adaptations under the same terms. Kinematics Graph Templates (Keynote file)