In the past week we explored the motion of accelerating carts down ramps, and what the position, velocity, and acceleration graphs for such a cart looks like. We used a variety of instruments to measure the motion of the carts from photogates to ultrasonic motion sensors to image analysis.
We produced graphs of the motion which the students were able to analyze.
We asked the question, what happens to the acceleration of a ball at the top of its path when it is thrown up in the air? To dive into this question we looked at carts with fans on them, and pushing a cart up a ramp.
The students thought about this theoretically, and then either performed experiments or played with computer models from PheT.
Here are the computer models if you would like to play with them.
