Skip to main content

Week 5 - How can we design a safe and durable playground surface?


Lab: 

    This week in lab we finished up our investigation on why we need to push a child on a swing to keep them going and how if they don't have a push, eventually they will run out of energy. We used a pendulum simulation to explore this idea more and noticed that the thermal energy or friction is what is slowing the pendulum down. We used an air particle model of the pendulum colliding with the air particles around it and discussed that as the pendulum collides with the air particles around it, it speeds them up while slowing the pendulum down, transferring energy from the pendulum to the air. 

    We then moved on to our last investigation of the physics module, how can we design a safe and durable playground surface? The first thing we did was use the engineering design process, and explored at all the different materials people have already used to create these surfaces. From those ideas, we gathered materials and began brainstorming with our groups as to how we wanted to design our surface so that it could prevent an egg from cracking when dropped a meter from the surface. We ended up using saran wrap, hay/straw, and the rubber mulch to cushion the fall of our egg. We came to the conclusion that too much force is what breaks the egg. In order to create a surface that doesn't break the egg, we had to increase the amount of time the egg takes to slow down. In our video, we noticed that not only was the egg affected by the impact but the surface was too. As the egg struck the surface, the energy transferred from the egg to the surface. The surface then compressed and sprung back transferring the energy which is now kinetic, back to the egg. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Week 10 - Earth's Structure

Lab In lab this week we worked to create different types of rocks including sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks. To do this, we used different colored starburst to represent different material being mixed together and used different methods to do so. The igneous rocks are hot and cool and some metamorphic rocks are created from heat but not melting, so we used both a candle and torch to mimic the heating of the rocks. For the sedimentary rocks we squished them together using different amounts of pressure to create the different types of rocks. We also used a bit of heat to cement the materials together.  Lecture Earth/Volcanoes On fault lines Either sliding by  Pulling apart  Or smashing into each other  Earthquakes in the US Due to fracking  Unstabilizing the Earth Plate Tectonics When plates smash together we get mountains Two kinds of plates When two of the same type of plates hit each other, they create a set of mountains If they’re opposite they cre...
Post a Comment
Read more