First Project for Fall 2016

Your first project is a collaborative project between 2- 4 students. You can not do it alone, nor can you have more than four students on it. If there are 5 (or more) students who want to work together, you can together do two projects and just put two people on one and three people’s names on the other. I think that would be great.

We will take data during class on Tuesday of week 3, meeting at Via Carta downhill from Baker Science. The project is due in class on Thursday. The project must include kinematic data from a video you take. It’s best if the camera/phone is mounted so that it doesn’t move around! You will make graphs of x <-> t, v<-> t, a <-> t. You may find that the displacement graphs are beautiful, the velocity graphs are a little noisy and the acceleration graph is a mess. Why do you think this is the case?

Additionally, you will have to do some calculation yielding a force and power output. You may find it helpful to make a graph of kinetic energy versus time as I did in one of my videos. If something is falling under gravitational acceleration, you could also have a graph of potential energy and total energy as a function of time.

The project is required. I would like each project report to have the following:
1) A narrative of what you did
2) A drawing depicting the activity
3) Raw data of position vs time as taken from the video.
4) Some measurement of energy or power.
5) Short discussion of what knowledge came from your activity? Are your results consistent with what you expected?