HaleighT

Students at Irondequoit High School have done it again. They’ve discovered a new and innovative way to determine the acceleration due to gravity using everyday tools such as a stopwatch, meter stick, and a basketball. To begin, brave student Danielle McKay climbed to the ceiling in order to measure the height of the room. “It was pretty cold up there,” McKay told us, “But it was worth it for science.” She dropped the basketball from the ceiling and timed how long it took to reach the ground. Scientist Emma Schum stood nearby taking down the measurements. After three trials, the times were averaged to .91 seconds of freefall. The basketball has not released a statement on his feelings about this at the time. Schum and McKay then used their favorite kinematic equation to determine the acceleration of the basketball. After much calculating and algebra, the acceleration was determined to be 6.28 meters per second squared. The team knew right away that something had gone horribly wrong. Schum told us, “We know the accepted acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 meters per second squared, so there must have been a stopwatch error.” McKay admits that “it was windy” that day. The percent error of this experiment has been confirmed to be at .36 at this time. Nonetheless, this experiment has broken records in three countries and the team responsible will go down in history for their discoveries. Haleigh Temple, reporter.

Todayour purpose was to find how fast the cars on Cooper Road, outside of our school,were going. The group took a role as anIrondequoit Police Officer to evaluate if any cars were exceeding the speedlimit. We had to use our knowledge of physics to help us calculate how the timeit took a car to travel a set distance related to the velocity, and how wetransfer that to relate to miles per hour. Here is our procedure: First, we decided how we wanted to set a distance,some groups used long strings of measuring tape to set a distance. We, howevermeasured a sidewalk block and chose to use 20 of them. We found each block was 1.51meters long, so our distance was 30.2 meters in total. Then, we split up thethree members of our group, gave two stop watches and put each on either sideof the testing zone, and one stood in the middle, and charted the descriptiveelements of each car. To find the time, we started each stop watch when the carreached the point of the first person and stopped the timer when it left thesecond person. We made a table to write down the times, and we measured thetimes of 10 cars. Following the test we calculated the average speed of the 10trials and calculated the average speed of each car to meters per second, andrelated that to the speed limit (35mph/ 15.6 m/s). We were able to find that noneof the cars were speeding. This is our chart: [TABLE="width: 379"] [TR] [TD]Car#[/TD] [TD]Distance (m)[/TD] [TD]Time (s)[/TD] [TD]Speed (m/s)[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]1[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.95[/TD] [TD="align: right"]10.24[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.46[/TD] [TD="align: right"]12.28[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]3[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.77[/TD] [TD="align: right"]10.90[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]4[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.81[/TD] [TD="align: right"]10.75[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]5[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.41[/TD] [TD="align: right"]12.53[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]6[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]3.48[/TD] [TD="align: right"]8.68[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]7[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.94[/TD] [TD="align: right"]10.27[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]8[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]3.33[/TD] [TD="align: right"]9.07[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]9[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.29[/TD] [TD="align: right"]13.19[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: right"]10[/TD] [TD="align: right"]30.2[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.45[/TD] [TD="align: right"]12.33[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD]Average[/TD] [TD="align: right"]2.789[/TD] [TD="align: right"]11.02[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Here's hoping the rest of the year goes better than our spaghetti tower... XD

The bizarre concepts seem to be the most fun! XD

Awkward Junior, reporting for duty! As you can probably already tell, I stink at usernames. Let's see... I like to sing quite a bit, although I have a tendency to start during that moment when everyone else stops talking which is always fun. ^^; I also like to take pictures in my free time, usually of various plants or buildings or the kids I volunteer with. There's not really anything else of consequence that I can think of at the moment, other than the fact that I'm really looking forward to this school year and all the weird things that are bound to happen during it. I really don't know what to expect in Physics this year. I signed up for the class because it was recommended that I do so, even though science has never exactly been my best subject. Still, I'm looking forward to learning about, well, everything! The idea of learning how a majority of things in the world are made possible fascinates me. I can't wait to apply what I learn in this class to the rest of my life and possibly even use the knowledge to better accomplish whatever tasks I have.