Week #2 Science Methods 2


The big question addressed in the lab: How is a rider's speed affected by different things such as slope, weight, clothing, etc.? 

Description of what you did

    In the lab, my group decided to test how slope affected the speed of a rider. We recorded data from three different slopes and measured the time it took for the rider to get down the slide for each different slope. We found that the bigger the slope the faster the rider went and vis versa the smaller the slope the slower the rider would go. 

A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture.

In the lecture, we learned about force. We know that things accelerate because of force. A lot of people think about this as gravity. When thinking about the effects force or gravity has on a slide it helps us understand why a steeper slide is a faster slide. This is because objects accelerate in the direction of an unbalanced force so when a slide is steeper the unbalanced force is higher which causes a rider to go faster. 

Answer questions about the weekly textbook reading:

    What did you learn?

    I learned about force and Newton's laws. All week Newton's laws would pop into my mind when discussing movement and it was nice to relearn the laws in the reading. 

    What was most helpful?

    Something helpful was the term inertia. Sometimes you think of something and you know what you are trying to say but you do not have a word for it. This whole week I was asked a lot about what affects how objects move and while there are many answers to this the broad answer is inertia. It was satisfying to finally have a word for it.

    What do you need more information on?

    Something I want to learn more about is friction. For some reason, I always thought of friction as rubbing my hands together and in the lecture when we discussed friction and looking at the reading I realized that friction is how things stop moving so getting a more in-depth explanation of it would be beneficial to me.  

    What questions/concerns/comments do you have?

     A question I have is: what is the best way to describe inertia to children? 

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