Energy 7. Two-Investigation Day!

 Today we did two investigations.  

1. How far will the meter stick move when hit by a Hot Wheels car released from different heights? 

This was basically a repeat of the experiment we did last week. This time, we changed the object that the car hit to a meter stick on top of another meter sticks. We did four trials per ramp height.

Here are our results:

2. How does the height of the ramp affect the speed of the Hot Wheels car? 

This investigation happened because the boys agreed that cars going down higher ramps had more energy (they saw how far they moved the objects they hit), but they wanted to actually measure the speed somehow.

I told them that without a radar gun, we would have to use the formula for speed:

Speed = Distance/Time

We decided to mark a line on the track, and start a timer at the release of the car and stop it as it passed the line.

This one took a lot of tries, because it was hard to coordinate the timer and the car release each time!  

Here are our results:

Tomorrow we will graph and analyze our results!