Skip to main content

Week 3: What affects a riders speed when sliding down a slide?

Lab: 

Our Data On a Graph
    This week in lab, we delved into what different variables affect the speed of a rider going down a slide. Before we began our investigation as a class we came up with different variables that we thought might affect the riders speed. Some of those variables include weight of the rider, height of slide, shape of slide, materials being sat on etc. Our group decided to investigate whether the height of the slide would affect the riders speed. Through our different trials we found that the higher the slide was, the faster the marble went down. This was true for the other group who also investigated how height affected the speed of the rider but it was also cool to listen to what other groups investigated, and what their results were. 

Lecture: 

    In lecture we continued to talk about the variables that could affect a riders speed down a slide. We talked more about the height of a slide and how as riders move down the slide they are accelerating. The higher the slide, the more time the rider has to increase their speed before they get to the bottom. Then we moved to talking about the steepness of a slide and the forces that are acting upon an object as it moves down. The slides surface pushes on the object as the gravity is also pulling down except the slides surface force is perpendicular to the slide. We finished lecture talking about why the speed of a rider could be affected by the surface or clothing they are wearing and focused in on the force of friction. We reviewed how friction is a force that opposes the sliding across a surface and can keep an object from moving. We also discussed how the magnitude of friction depends on the type of surface as well as how hard the surfaces are being pushed together. 

Textbook Reading: 

What I learned: In this weeks reading, I learned that when objects move a force needs to act on it. Every object regardless of the motion or if its not moving, is being acted on by forces 24/7. In order to make something move, an additional force has to be strong enough to make it move. If equal forces are applied in opposite directions, objects don't move and the forces are balanced. Unbalanced forces result in the movement of objects. 

What was found most useful: I found the car crash example of Newton's first law to be the most helpful as it was one of the things I struggled to grasp as a younger learner. I think that this is a great way to introduce the concept to students and it's easy them to see it unfolding. 

What I need more information on: I think I would need a few examples on how objects can move without touching it. While I get the magnets, I struggle to come up with other examples of this that could helps students understand. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 2 - How do we make a race exciting between people who run at different speeds?

Lab:       Today, we continued our thinking about how we can support play that is exciting but not dangerous. We narrowed in on how we can make a race exciting between people who run at different speeds and started by watching a video of "The Freeze" racing fans but giving each of them a head start. Each race he caught up to his opponent and ended up beating them in every clip of the video. We used the video as an example for our big question and inquiry for the day. We were asked to use our model of a race to develop a method to ensure that a race is exciting between two racers. Our groups thinking was that we needed to calculate our distance per second so that when we were matched up against our opponent, we can calculate the distance head start that they would need for the race to be a close call.  Our Data Table      Based off of our calculations we multiplied them by the race length to figure out how long each racer would take to complete the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 9 - History of the Earth

 Lab: This week in Lab we worked to create a realistic and to scale timeline of the creation of the universe all the way up until today. We divided our timeline into 14 meters to have 1 meter represent a billion years. Before we got to find out when humans, animals, and plants all appeared on Earth, we placed our initial individual guesses on the timeline so that we can see how that differed from when these things actually appeared/came to be. It was actually crazy to see how close dinosaurs, the first land animals, first land plants, humans, and the creation of the moon were in our timeline. I feel like in all our our educations, we would make these timelines but they weren't up to scale and they didn't accurately represent the amount of time between each of these milestones. Lecture: Exam Textbook: History of the Earth I learned that the Earth was almost entirely ice at least 3 times in it's history. I remember reading about one of these event's briefly but didn't...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 11 - Rocks and the Rock Cycle

Lab In lab we started by talking about the law of superposition... everyones fav! This law basically states that the older stuff is at the bottom and the longest is at the top. We used this to work to place different layers of rock in order from oldest to youngest based off different photos. Immediately, I was taken back to my ninth grade earth and space science class and I could remember doing exactly what we were doing in lab, but back in early high school... props to Ms. Howlett :)  Then we moved into talking about different characteristics that sand from different places had. We looked closely at sand from beaches, dunes, and rivers around the world. Our group decided to look at each group and write down observations about each sample. All of the different rock types were from different areas and all had different colors, were different shapes, and just looked different. We came up with some characteristics for sand found in rivers, dunes, and beach's.  River Sand Characte...
Post a Comment
Read more