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Speeding Lab


jdinolfo7

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Physics Lab 9/12/12

Group:

Jennifer Dinolfo

Dan Southwell

Jeramy Brown

Brenden Goebert

Introduction:

This speeding lab project forces student’s to measure distance, time going from one point to another, description of cars passing by, and lastly, calculating average speed. Groups of 3-4 students work together and help the police department maintain safety on Cooper Road. Cooper Road has a speed limit of 35 mph (15.6 m/s, or 56.3 km/hr) and our goal for this project was to gather data about the speeds of cars driving down Cooper Rd.

Procedure:

  1. Formulate a plan- Which group member is assigned to what direction. Jennifer and Dan both calculated time on their own stopwatch. Jeremy measured the distance, and Brenden described the cars passing by.

  2. When we went outside, Jeremy measured a distance of 29 Meters from our starting point (the bus stop sign) to our ending point (the first light post pointing East).

  3. Then, both Dan and Jennifer got out stop watches out and Brenden got his notebook out to jot down what each cars license plate number was as well as the color of the car.

  4. When a car was approaching Jennifer yelled out what the color of the car that her group was tracking next so that everyone was ready. When the car was approaching the bus stop sign Jennifer yelled one, two, three and then she and Dan hit the stop watches to track the time(in seconds) of the travelling car. When the car hit our ending point Jennifer yelled and…STOP! And she and Dan stopped the stop watch.

  5. Our group repeated steps 3 and 4 ten times, until we received all of our data.

  6. When our group had all 10 cars tracked, we ended up with a data table filled with distance, two tracking’s of time for each car, and the descriptions of the car.

  7. Now that we are done, we cleaned up our work outside, came inside and starting calculating data. We calculated average time for each car and average speed for all 10 cars. Now all we have left to do is compare our results with the speed limit on Cooper Road.

    [TABLE="width: 411"]

    [TR]

    [TD]Car#[/TD]

    [TD]Distance (m)[/TD]

    [TD]Time1 (s)[/TD]

    [TD]Time2 (s)[/TD]

    [TD]AvgTime (s)[/TD]

    [TD]Speed (m/s)[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]1[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.28[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.16[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.22[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]9.01[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]2[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.71[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.82[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.77[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]10.49[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]3[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.44[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.56[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.50[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]11.60[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]4[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]4.16[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]4.07[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]4.12[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]7.05[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]5[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.81[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.54[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.68[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]10.84[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]6[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.19[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.38[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]12.69[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]7[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.61[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.48[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.55[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]11.39[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]8[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.1[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.15[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.13[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]9.28[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]9[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.57[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.43[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.50[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]11.60[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD="align: right"]10[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]29[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.51[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.42[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]3.47[/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]8.37[/TD]

    [/TR]

    [TR]

    [TD][/TD]

    [TD][/TD]

    [TD]Average[/TD]

    [TD][/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]2.92

    [/TD]

    [TD="align: right"]10.23

    Conclusion:

    Our results proved that no one out of our ten cars was speeding on Cooper Road. To improve our data I would use a more accurate time measurement, it was very difficult to have 2 people do it because we rarely got the same time.

    Therefore based on our results there is not a speeding problem on Cooper Road. This is becasue when we calculated the average speed from our sdistance and time measurements we found that no car was going over 15.6 m/s (35 mph). Overall, this lab was fun becasue we got to use physics out side of the classroom!

    [/TD]

    [/TR]

    [/TABLE]

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