Energy 5. Planning and Carrying out an Investigation

 How does changing the speed of an object affect its energy? 

We had a question to answer. We reviewed what we learned by reading the chart we created yesterday: (These were all student statements about what they learned.)

"The rubber band transfers energy to the marble. There is energy when there is a moving object all the time. How fast the marble is - is how much energy it has. How much energy the marble has is how much the cup moves. The more energy the rubber band transfers to the marble, the more energy transfers to the cup and the more it will go. The speed of the object changes when the energy transfers."

Then the boys decided how they would test to see how changing the speed of something affects its energy. They discussed various possibilities and decided to use a hot wheels car and measure how far the car goes when started at slopes of different heights.

First, they set up the track in the classroom.

The problem was the car went too far and ran into the wall on the far side of the room.  We would need more space for the track.  So we went into the main building and set up there. Our next problem was that there was not enough track for the car, so it was hard to measure how far it went. 

The boys decided to set up something for the car to hit and measure how far the object moved.

They tried several objects before settling on a small box.  The box seemed to be a good choice and they were ready to collect data!

One student recorded the data.

We ran out of time, so we were only able to collect one trial for each height. Tomorrow we will graph our data and analyze our results! We will also discuss how having more trials would help to ensure our results are valid.