Physics is taught here by Mrs. Chase and is modeled off of the AP Physics C Mechanics course, providing students the oportunity to take the test at the end of the year. Here you will complete many labs, proving the rules learned about in class to yourself, explore many physical properties of objects and how they move and so much more.
This was one of our early physics labs, performed during our dynamics unit. Dynamics describes the interactions between different objects and forces and is typically used to predict the movement of an object given a force. For this lab we were permitted to pose any question so long as it had to do with dynamics. My group chose to confirm Newton's Second Law of Motion, which states that force = mass x acceleration, using a cart, a weight of the same mass as the cart, and an inclined plane. Here we changed the degree of the incline on the plane and measured the acceleration of the cart. We then compared the measured accelerations with our expected accelerations using Newton's Second Law to see if the correlated enough to state that Newton's Second Law was true.
A POW, or Problem Of the Week, is a short problem with a write-up meant to be completed in class. We often do them in math and very occasionally in physics. The goal of the POW is to have us think outside the box, as these problems are typically outside of the norm of what is seen in homework and the like. In our writeups, we are required to include a description of the problem, our method, and finally our solution. This POW was completed during our dynamics unit.