Last week I began building a mousetrap car with a friend of mine who was given the assignment as an extra credit assignment in their physics class. Their assignment is to build a car whose sole source of energy is a mousetrap. Whoever's car goes the farthest wins. While doing my research I found a few ideas centered around physics that appeared most important to the success of our car.
large wheel to axel ratio
Due to the small size of a mousetrap we only have the ability to rotate an axle a
Last week in class we began discussing gravity and the question came about as to what gravity is and what causes it. Gravity is an interesting part of science in that we can explain how it acts and predict what it will do but we it is not know what actually causes gravity. Just so we're clear, gravity is an attraction between two masses. All masses have a gravitational attraction to each other, even two people, although with small masses the force is essentially negligible. Although we don't kno
As we approach midterms it is hard to believe that we are more then half way through our journey in AP-C Physics. It has been a fun first semester. Taking the kinematics material much deeper then we did in physics B has been very intriguing. However tt seems like we have learned so much but at the same time I barely remember any of it. Even after I review formulas I have trouble recalling them during our four minute drills. There so much information on kinematics that it seems almost impossible
Over the past week we continued our studies of rotational motion, adding momentum and torque to our bank of knowledge. Unfortunately for me, i missed the first two days of the unit last week while I was out of town. As a result I have spent most of the week confused and out of the loop on practice problems. This weekend, I finally decided to help myself and learn the material. I did this by watching parts of two lectures done by MIT professor Walter Lewin. I watched both videos and took notes on
This past week my AP C class undertook an independent unit on impulse and moment. For the week we were given a lab, a multiple choice packet, and free response questions that we had to complete by the end of the week. Upon completion of our work we will be tested on impulse and momentum. This being the first time that I have ever been given as assignment like this it seemed interesting but it also seemed like if I was not on top of things in class I would have a lot of homework. Fortunately over