8-25-09 Physics Class

Today, with our 2 hours of class, we learned many things that are going to better help us understand what we will do later this semester. First, Mr. Burk handed us back our Bogus Wkshts with our out of 2 grade. Next we talked about position/time graphs that was on the 2A HW. The homework showed us how to record what distance someone is going in and how fast through work on the paper. Then we got into the heart of the class; first thing was that we split up into groups of 3 and drew on our whiteboard how to graph a position/time graph of a car going at a constant rate. Then we expressed the same thing with and equation and words. THEN, if you were really good at that, you made a velocity/time graph of the car and an equation: v(t)=vo. Easy!

As a class we had two discussion questions: what is the meaning of slope in a v/t graph? and what is the meaning of area? The slope is the acceleration of the object and the area is the displacement because v times t is m/s times s which cancels out the seconds leaving you with m - displacement Thanks Joe.

The last part of class was deticated to the basketball/tickertape lab. In groups of 3 we wanted to see the acceleration and velocity of a falling basketball starting from about 6 ft. in the air. We recorded the basketball's position in incremints of 1/60th of a second and put it on an Excel Spreadsheet. Then we took it to the lab to make some final touches before turning in work and getting the HW and printed it out. That's it -- tomorrow's scribe is gonna be Sana.

also here are some pics of the lab:

(actually it's up top)