Students at Mass Academy take a calculus-based physics course. This course covers the material in the AP Physics C Mechanics exam. Throughout the course, students learn how to apply calculus basics to mechanics and mechanics-related fields. The school also provides the opportunity to partake in the F = ma exam, through which students may qualify for the United States Physics Olympiad. Though the course covers material from AP Physics C Mechanics, students can also choose to take the algebra-based AP Physics 1 exam if they wish.
One of the various lab activities we completed in this class is the dynamics lab, in which we measured an Atwood's Machine where one mass sat on an incline. We observed how changing the incline angle affected the acceleration of the masses. The lab report describes our initial question, our hypothesis, our experimental setup, our variables, our data, our analysis, and our conclusions.
The results of the data analysis showed that increasing the incline angle (making it more vertical) caused the block on the incline to go down the slope faster (or up the slope slower). Our results show a sinusoidal relationship between the angle and the acceleration, which we confirmed mathematically in the analysis section.
This is a problem in which students were tasked with solving for the motion of a rocket that has different stages of flight – initial stages with upward acceleration, a stage of projectile motion, and finally a linear motion stage at the end. Given the starting conditions of the rocket, and some information about it's position in flight, we needed to find the direction and final displacement of the rocket.
In the attached file, my approach to this problem is as follows: I solved for the rocket's variables such as velocity, acceleration, and displacement, one stage after another. I split the problem into three problems for each stage in the rocket's motion, using the calculations from the previous stage to get values from the next stage. You can read more details in the attached file.