Recently students in Mr. Fullerton's regents physics class have taken up an important task, calculating the acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the earth. This question was answered in a simple manner, by dropping balls on the English classes below them. The known and accepted answer by the scientific community is 9.91 meters per second square, but did these students get that answer? The answer was not exactly that. From two students tests Ben and Gerrard the calculated value was 11 meters a second square. With a 12 percent error this may be the best these students could do with the equipment available. In the future perhaps their will be a better way for high school students to calculate this important figure but for now we will have to accept what we can get. Hopefully it was worth interrupting English classes below but that’s a story for another day.
By Ben Steiner and Gerrard Caso