Week of September 23rd

 In lab today we looked closer into pendulum simulations and saw how thermal energy worked. We also got a deeper understanding of why swings slow down and stop. The energy of the swing gets brought into the air leading the swing to stop, thermal energy. Then we started taking a look at the question of the day, How can we design a safe and durable playground surface?. To answer this question we had to look into some engineering design steps, such as; create, explore, try it out, make it better, and identify the problem. We then looked at some examples of playground surfaces such as wood chips, pebbles, turf, and rubber. This can help us understand that not one surface has been proven to be the best. We then started our group work, which was seeing which design would be best to prevent from an egg cracking when dropped 1 meter high. Here were the results from our trial:

As I read the pressbook from last week, I realized the similarities from lab this week based off energy. when we dropped the egg in the egg drop experiment, the energy was highest at the bottom of the drop. The pressbook related this to a wrecking ball and stated that kinetic energy is highest at the bottom as it uses all its energy then to smash the building. This relates to the egg drop because as we saw during the experiment, once the egg was at the bottom it seems the most powerful and ended up bouncing on our material because it hit so hard.  The topic of kinetic energy was most helpful this week as it tied back to our experiment in lab. I learned that the energy of each material matters for playground safety. 

No lecture this week due to test!