Motion.

This is our Motion blog-- Mel, Erin, and Marissa. 

The Moving Man and Sandbag Experiment were both good experiments to introduce physics. I had a hard time with the Moving Man one though because of all the calculations. The one thing I did like better about the moving man than the sandbag experiment is that you were able to see the numbers changing in the velocity and the acceleration. It was a good way to see what we were doing in the sandbag experiment in actual numbers on a screen. 

The graph i made was the mapping of the sandbags. I found this job to be actually a little difficult, it was hard to draw a good picture from what was on the ground, especially when it came to the last two when we changed direction and made up our own. It was really hard to draw the map where Mel had been spinning around in a circle, the map sort of resembled the one where we had to change directions.

The moving man process was originally the most confusing thing to our group. We probably sat at the computer trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. The second day, after further explanation, it was actually pretty easy. We were supposed to enter in different velocities and acceleration to accumulate a graph that represented the data collected from the website. We explored the motion of objects and were asked to represent them using tables and graphs from our acceleration data and our different velocity data.

On the day of the motion project, Mel and I (Marissa) were going to work on the ramps. We got the ramp, a car, a wedge, an acceleration monitor (A.M.), a pen and a graph paper. We measured a distance for the car to start from. (Where the car began, to the middle of the A.M.) Then we attached the A.M. to the ramp. We let go of the car to undergo the A.M. We recorded the numbers, and then graphed it to find the slope and what the angle would look like. The examples will be shown as such. 

The purpose of the tennis ball experience was to see average velocity versus gravity at different heights from the ground. We had ten tennis balls that were dropped from 5 different levels and a for a total of 20 timed trials. Our results turned out not very accurate and think this could have been due to a couple things. One of them was that were using one stop watch and one cell phone. Another was that we had two different people alternating between throwing tennis balls. Looking at the different results groups had--things that differed was our data. Those who also did tennis balls rounded differently, therefore making data different. The golf ball group had completely data, which ended up being much more accurate. 

The Newton's Laws took the whole class period for last Thursday. We were given three videos to watch (each about the three laws) and we were to construct experiments for each law. The ways our natural world works, these laws are put into motion just by us living our normal lives. By doing or normal routines, we are putting these laws into use.

The first law states that an object of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force. We kicked a tennis ball to represent this law.

The second law states that the acceleration of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the net force, and inversly proportional to the mass. (F=ma). We used a toy car going down a ramp while using the A.M to collect our data. We used a toy car with a weight attached, and one without. Our data is shown below.
 

The third law states that the mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear. We played tug of war to represent this. 

Here is the info on the ramp activity Erin and Marissa did while I was not feeling well: