Reflection 6

This week we began learning about friction and how to make force maps.  Friction is a resistance for objects to slide past each other.  We learned this by watching dry ice go across a table.  The dry ice has no resistance because it isn’t actually touching the table meaning there isn't any friction.  The ice emits off a gas which lifts it off the table.  Thus no friction is created, in order to make friction you need to have something touching another thing.  They need to be touching each other.  We also watched a video on gravity rooms they work by having something on a ramp so your mind plays tricks on itself and you have no idea what to think.  Water will go at an angle, you will walk on an angle and everything seems off.  This is related back to what we are learning about forces. Forces are just something either pushing or pulling something.  Gravity is just Earth pulling on us.  That’s why everything has to go down; the forces acting upon it make it do that.  But the way we are able to stand up is because our force pushing down is equal to how much earth is pushing us down.  If one wasn’t perfectly equal then we wouldn’t be able to stand or the opposite we would catapult into the sky. 

 

Week 5 Reflection''

This week we did another assessment and learned all of the formulas.   We also spent a couple of days trying to T-Bone one buggy car with another.  The reason that we did this was to fine tune all of the things we did so far.  Like measuring how far we had to go in order to get to the "X" in the middle, using all of the formulas as in y=mxb, v=vi, etc.  All of these things helped me to, in a way, study about the assessment.   It worked because I got all 3s and 4s.  I'm pretty proud of myself and i believe that I'm doing pretty well in the class so far.  As always I'm looking forward to what we are going to learn this week, especially since we are starting a new unit and i get a whole new group.  I love meeting new people and i love learning, which is a pretty good trait to have in school i believe.

The way that we figured out how far the buggy cars needed to go was by calculating how many centimeters each car went in one second, how far the two starting lines were away from the ending point, and how many seconds/centimeters we needed to put the cars in order for them to crash.  The experiment went rather well, on the second try our two buggy cars managed to smack right into each other and i felt rather proud that they did.  The whole experiment, i discovered later, was designed to make us use all of the formulas and other things we had learned in order to do and solve our experiment.  After the crashing of the cars we had to white board the results and how we got them.  So like I said, everything we've learned so far.

Hopefully I’ll continue to get better at what I do in the class and master the ways of the graphs and formulas.  This next week I’m hoping that we start to drop stuff off of roofs, I love seeing things break.  As always I’m looking forward to this next week of learning and can’t wait to see what it holds in store.

Week 4

This past week we started to go deeper into graph making.  We learned how to find velocity and graph it.  Which is just a simple equation V=Displacement/Time.  We then learned how to find area from that on a graph.  It was tricky but after a few trys it was easier.  I'm still no master at it, but im hopeful and i feel that with more practice ill continue to get better and better at it.  My team is struggling with it but i am hopeful that they will also start to understand it and master it.  The assessment this week also went well as i got all 3s 3.5s or 4s.  I'm very glad with this score as it shows my understanding and, not to toot my own horn, mastery of the subject.  As always I'm very excited for this next week and can't wait to see what it will bring and what more amazing things i will learn in Team Physics