Topics in Physics, Day 1- Kilali and Sara

-

Topics in Physics, Day 1

By: Kilali and Sara

Kilali's Marble Run

 Today was our first day in the Physics A-Term. We had a day full of fun activities. We started off with making a marble run, the goal was to see who's marble run would take the longest to reach the bottom of the track. We worked individually for the most part since it was a competition, but we were able to help each other. It was fun to see how the input of others helped the runs and how everyone had different ways to improve the runs. It was actually very difficult to make sure that the marble reached the bottom of the course slowly and without getting stuck or falling off. Kilali had the slowest track, which was 5.73 seconds. It was a little frustrating since there were times where the marble would reach the bottom of the track with ease but in other times it would get stuck. When I was presenting my marble run to the class the marble got stuck, even though just 2 minutes before it was going through the course smoothly. 

Alex's Engineering Challenge

After this we did an Engineering challenge, we were supposed to design the tallest freestanding structure that supports a marshmallow. We were given 20 pieces of spaghetti, 1 meter of tape, and 1 meter of rope. we had to be very delicate while making the towers since we did not want the spaghetti to break. It was a little difficult since we had to construct a tower that could support the weight of a heavy marshmallow. I felt slightly stressed since I was taking my time to build my tower I had to rush to build my tower and it ended up being very sturdy. Alex had the tallest tower, which was 47 cm. Mine came at a close second place at 44 cm. After lunch we started planning our Paper Marble Run, we have a base plan and we will start constructing it tomorrow morning. Today I learned a lot and I can't wait to see what we will learn tomorrow!


Kilali's Engineering Challenge 

Alex's Marble Run

Sara's Marble Run

  
Alex making design 1
of Engineering Challenge

Sara's Engineering Challenge 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Topics in Physics, Day 3- Sara and Alex

-
Image
Action Shot of Drop Zone   Topics in Physics, Day 3 Photos By: Sara - Blog By: Alex We started off the day today with an activity called "The Drop Zone." The goal was to have a cup with a marble in it slide down a 2 meter long fishing line "zip line" and have the cup dump the marble in a specific target zone before the end of the line. We used paperclips, weights, and precisely carved pieces of paper that we attached to the inside of the cup to have the marble roll through a tube and into the target zone. The main concept that we covered in this activity was the idea of projectile motion, which we later dove into deeper with equations and practice problems. Kilali Measuring Free Falls Later on in the morning we got a lesson on free falls and acceleration due to gravity, which we followed up with an experiment that demonstrated the possible accuracy (and inaccuracy) of using human response time to make precise measurements. We did this by dropping a ball from a speci...
Read more

Topic in Physics Day 5- Alex and Kilali

-
Image
 Topics in Physics, Day 5 By Alex and Kilali Sara working on the Hotwheels activity Today we did a lot of fun lessons and activities. We started off doing some practice force equations since we started learning about forces yesterday. These were pretty difficult, but it made me very happy when we got the correct answers in the end. Afterward, we did an activity with the Hotwheels. In this activity, we set up a pully system with the Hotwheels and where we had washers hanging off the table which was connected to our Hotwheels car. We would attach a different amount of washers each time we ran the experiment. We did this activity to see the change in acceleration of the Hotwheels car for each amount of washers we used. This activity was very fun and exciting. I really enjoyed seeing how fast the car would move depending on how many washers we had attached to the other end of the pulley.  Sara and Kilali working on the collisions activity In the afternoon we started working on mom...
Read more

Topics in Physics, Day 6- Sara and Alex

-
Image
Topics in Physics, Day 6 Photos By: Sara - Blog By: Alex Kilali Connecting the Spiral Track Segments The Building Blocks of our Coaster We started off the second week of our A-Term by doing some practice and review into the concepts of energy and momentum, and doing a few fun projects that applied these concepts. We built roller coasters! Using some of our advanced lab tools and our new skills of interpreting data from a graph, we were able to see the acceleration and velocity of the car that we shot down the rollercoaster. The first rollercoaster we made in the first half of the day went well and was able to launch the card using a chain and a motor. The second one didn't really go as planned. We had to use improvisational engineering skills to change most the design of the rollercoaster, and it ended up being twice as large as it was supposed to be according to the instruction book. This was a very fun experience, and I definitely learned a lot about having to work...
Read more