This past week the students explored the ideas of “vectorial motion” or what we now call momentum. We explored the ideas of the force-impulse relationship.
Here you can see Sara H. throwing an egg at a sheet, yet it does not break, as the time of impact is slowed.
Later in the period we explored some bouncing problems involving cricket bats and balls. To hit a ball with a bat you need to account for the vector nature of momentum. The bat first stops the ball, and then sends it back into the field.
The final thing you will see in the below video is the bouncing tennis ball demo where the tennis ball gains momentum from its collision with the basketball!
This coming week we are going to do experimentation with momentum using various collisions. Simple one-dimensional collisions we can observe with dynamics carts. But to quantitatively analyze two-dimensional collisions will take something advanced like a Playsurface from Templeman Automation. Here you can see Chris Templeman installing PlaySurface (a touch table) in our classroom. He is joined by Steve Boardman, a graduate student from the CEEO at Tufts who is developing software for the PlaySurface. Harrison and Andrew helped us set things up. Hopefully one of them will figure out how to program it.
