Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Marble Motion

The next lab we did was called Marble Motion. 

 Guiding Questions: Does the mass of a marble affect how it moves?
                                 When given a force, what happens to it's motion?

What were we supposed to do is we had couple of different circular objects: Marble, Styrofoam ball, golf ball, big marble and the tennis ball. We had straws and we had to blow toward the ball and see the distance and the path of each ball.
  

          
Data Analysis:  When we blew the ball with the straw these circular objects, for some of them we needed two straws.

Conclusion:  The mass of a ball indicates the difficulty of it to get moving. If a ball is lighter, it's easier to move, but it's more " clumsy" meaning it's not going a straight path. If a ball is heavy, it's harder to move, but it goes in a perfect straight directions. So practically,its the same thing with balls as it is to humans. If a person is  light, he/she would be easier to move than a fat man.
    When a force is given to a certain object, it's motion changes. When a gravity is getting smaller, the changing of direction is diminishing.


   

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

From feet to Fathoms

Guiding question: What is the importance of having an International measuring system? How accurate are old measurements using body parts?

Hypothesis: The importance of having a International measuring system is that people could measure things while meter sticks were not invented.

Materials: body, meter stick, calculator,  hallway, peep, whiteboard, crayon box, space book, and a desk.

Procedure: 
 
1.       Make a data table in your notebook with 7 columns and 7 rows.  (See below).
2.       Choose one of the six objects or distances you will measure.
3.       Determine what form of measurement you will make with the first object. (For example:  Length of the 6th grade hallway with paces, book with palm or hand, fingernail for crayon box, etc…)
4.       Measure it with the determined form of measurement 3 times, and then find the average. 
5.       Measure it with the meter stick/or measuring tape and find the actual measurement.  (IMPORTANT!!!!!  BE SURE THAT THE UNITS OF MEASUREMENT STAY THE SAME, either inches or centimeters or yards or feet or meters and the average needs to be in the same units)
 6:       Repeat the same for each of the five objects that are left and measure it with a different type of measurement, 3 times, find the average and again the actual measurement.

 7: Compare class data results.  Find the average of these results.
Data Table:
Object
Measure-ment Type
Measure-ment #1
Measure-ment #2
Measure-ment #3
Average
Actual Measurement
Peep
 inch
 6
 6
 6
 6
 5.5 cm
Book
inch
9.5 inch
10 inch
10 inch
9.833 inch
10.5
Hallway
Fathom
8
7.5
7
7.5
1,050 cm
Whiteboard
 Egyptian cubit
 7 cubits
 7 cubits
 6 cubits
 6.66
 2.51 cm
Crayon box
inch
3.5
4
4
3. 833
?
Desk/table
English yard
2 yards
2 yards
2 yards
2 yards
137 cm
.
 Data Analysis: There was sometimes similar averages in our group. For example, look at the book and the crayon box, they are only few inches different in size.  

Conclusion: I would prefer the current measuring system, because for some of the old measuring systems, your parts of the body would get tired, and it causes trouble to keep working for your muscles. I think we need the International measuring system for accurate measurements such as for building a house, if you measure a millimeter or shorter, the whole house can go to hell. My hypothesis was correct, because it turned out as I thought it would.