Week of September 16th

 In lab, our main question was "Why do things fall at different rates?". We talked about the gravity test and what gravity truly means for different weight of objects. We looked at the slide diagram, and decided as a group of where the forces go. We then did a gravity test based on a wooden ball vs a metal ball, a tennis ball, a crumpled piece of paper, and a tennis ball vs. a tighter crumpled piece of paper. We saw that each of these tests had different ending. When we did the 2 balls, we noticed they dropped at the same time. When we compared the tennis ball to the slightly crumpled paper, we saw that the tennis ball fell first. Finally, then when we tested the tennis ball and the tightly crumpled paper, we noticed they fell at the same time. This was surprising because initially we would think the heavier object would always fall first. We then noticed the effect of air resistance onto the objects. Since the less crumpled paper has more cracks, more air went into the paper which made is slow down. We then talked about the credentials that affect how swings can go back and forth. As a group we spent some time looking at how wind can affect the objects time swinging back and forth. We noticed that from our investigations that wind doesn't have much of a affect as we thought. The wind and not wind trials were nearly the same!

In the pressbook, I learned about what a pendulum is, which is a weight suspended from a fixed point that can swing freely.  Here are some more information that I got:

The most helpful topic in the pressbook was showing some real life examples such as "Galileo and Clocks". No questions this week/don't need more any information!

In lecture we talked about a picture of a child on a swing and talked about the forces on the child on a swing. We also learned the phrase called "period". The period in this case is the time it takes for the swing to go back and forth. We also looked into Newton's first law. This law talked about- without an (unbalances) external force, an object will maintain its speed and its direction of motion. This helps explain that the external force (air) for example on a swing, can depend ths speed or direction of the swing. Air hockey is also useful for Newtons first law, as air hockey is good at reducing friction and shows that the puck will go in a straight line/steady speed until they hit something else (external force). We then looked into Newtons second law; F-ma, which then led to the conclusion that larger masses are harder to accelerate. We also then looked to the lab, and looked at different investigations that students did for the swing. One group found the longer the rope, the longer the period of time the swing had.  These examples led to the topic of the energy lens on motion. We saw that energy can be transferred from one system to another, never is created or destroyed, and manifests in many ways such as movement, light, heat, or electricity.

Photos:

wind trial

wind trial

data from our wind trials

graph of wind trials