Advanced Physics taught by Mrs. Chase is perhaps the most content-filled course provided at Mass Academy. Students are prepared with all the skills and information necessary to succeed on the AP Physics B, AP Physics C: Mechanics, and AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism exams, all in one accelerated one-year course! Our days in the Physics classroom were packed with labs and experiments, many of which we were able to create ourselves, deriving formulas and equations, while learning how to apply calculus techniques to these formulas to solve even more complex and challenging problems!
In 1784, George Atwood connected two masses on either end of a pulley to illustrate the laws of motion. This type of machine is now known as the Atwood’s machine. Like Atwood, my group members, Nicholas Giza, Cecilia Carbonnell, and I were challenged to create our own modified version of Atwood’s Machine. We decided to put two carts, one traveling on a ramp and the other traveling across a horizontal surface, and see how adjusting the angle would affect the rate of acceleration. The results were pretty intriguing if I do say so myself. Curious what they were? Then check out my one-page report on the experiment here!
Forces and Motion are cool and all, but once you get to energy, that’s when it gets interesting! What’s even better? Rolling one cart down a track to collide with another at progressively faster speeds! Before and after each collision, we recorded the velocity of each cart and used our formulas to find the change in Kinetic Energy as well as Momentum for all three trials. We found that more and more energy was lost as the cart grew faster. Find out why in our one-slide report available below!