PHYSICS: Great job on the vertical circular motion problems! Here’s the short lesson from today, then a look back at some of the early circular motion problems. Fun times!! 🙂
Physics 2-9-17 Vertical Circular Motion from Tammy Skinner on Vimeo.
Physics 2-9-17 Vertical Circular Motion
I will rank myself a 3 out of 5 for this week. First of all, my car did not go at all how it was supposed to, and that was very depressing. Monday, it curved right a bit. So I spent a lot of time Monday afternoon putting finishing touches on it for style and offense, and I put an effort into making it go straighter. Unfortunately, my launching system was not 100% reliable but rather around 90%. Most of the time, the string would be tight enough to achieve an effective conversion from potential elastic energy to kinetic. Every now and then though, the string would be too tight to allow a complete conversion: the latch of the rat trap got stuck halfway. It also was not extremely fast getting started – even when it launched fully – which meant that during the competition, it hardly went anywhere and was utterly defeated. It also lost speed and distance, so that was a big bummer. For redemption, the lab on Wednesday was really not too bad. I just hope that Jonathan and I managed to keep the radius and time accurate for every single trial! The homework is coming along quite well, too. I am really enjoying circular motion because most of the time, it is a simple formula. Those problems are the best for me!
This week was crazy! I rate myself a 4 out of 5. I had some trouble with torque and circular motion, but I’m getting better as we do problems. The labs we did this week really helped me to understand what we were learning all about and the homeworks reinforced the ideas. My car went great (even though I didn’t win 🙁 ) but I was still happy with it’s performance (except for a broken axle).
I would rate myself a 4 out of 5 for this week. I had trouble on some of the homework this week. Mainly it was circular motion. My rat trap car did well, considering I had to make a few changes at the last minute. I was able to get the distance victory right before my rat trap began to fail. The only weak point of my car was that the trap was not reliable. On the lab, I was surprised by how well we did. Today’s lesson was a little difficult for me to understand, so I will need to go back to my notes and the videos.