11-3-08

First period after the long weekend, students walking into class didn’t seem happy. The first couple people even forgot to pick up the papers on the front desk like we do every day. The papers were about the new unit we were starting. One paper was an outline for Unit 4, one was the reading guide that’s due the day of the unit test, and the last paper was a lab for later in class.

Mr. Manning started by handing back our Create Your Own Problem, the Unit 3 reading guide, and the tests from Thursday. We went over the test and handed it back in.

We then read the first two pages of the new lab called Force and Motion. With a set up on his desk, Mr. Manning demonstrated what we would be doing for the rest of class. The set up looked like this:





Mr. Manning described how the cart has mass and you apply the force, causing the cart to accelerate. Acceleration is then recorded by the motion detector. We used Logger Pro to find acceleration and the average force of the cart (mean).

After starting the lab, my group made the prediction that the relationship between unbalanced force and acceleration will be an inverse relationship. What other groups should note is that before they start moving the cart and recording it's acceleration, they should make sure the string connecting the weight and cart has slack. My group made this mistake and it delayed our results.