{ Physics }

Physics is taught by Mrs. Chase. We’ve learned many of the basic concepts of physics: reading position, velocity, and acceleration graphs, kinematics, projectiles, dynamics, energy, momentum, and centripetal motion. Each unit, we take notes, do homework assignments to practice the skills, do a lab, take a quiz, do End Of Chapter (EOC) questions as a review, and then take the unit test. The number one thing I’ve learned from this class is to just trust yourself. You will get stuck a lot on problems and need to troubleshoot, and it’s easy when you get something wrong to lose confidence. I’ve found though that you know more than you think you do, and the tests are usually easier than the EOC questions.

Acceleration on an Inclined Plane Lab

This was the first lab we did in this class. We were trying to find the acceleration of a cart using distance and velocity. In our groups, we released the cart from 6 different distances along the inclined plane and calculated its velocity using a photogate (a type of lab equipment that measures the velocity of an object). Once we completed our experiment, we did a lab analysis. This lab was cool because it was teaching us how to set up an experiment and do a lab write-up. This school has been very good at accommodating to the fact that all of us come from different schools and have different levels of knowledge. For someone who hadn’t done a lab write-up before, this was a good introduction.

Dynamics Lab

I had a lot of fun with this lab because there was a lot of freedom. We came up with the experiment we wanted to perform in relation to dynamics, and then we did the experiment. Lindsey Paradise, Gustavo Rodriguez, and I decided to test how tension changed by changing the mass on our modified Atwood’s machine (pulley system). We kept mass 1 the same throughout the trials (mass 1 was a block we put on the ramp) while incrementing mass 2 (the mass hanging off the edge of the ramp) by 20g. We then measured the critical angle (the angle at which mass 1 overcame the static friction and started sliding down the ramp) and used that value, as well as mass 2, to find tension and mu using the equations we had derived. I was very proud of my lab write-up because it was a comprehensive analysis of the experiment while also looking nice and being easy to read.

What is the speed of a student who is late to a class across campus?

Answer: Error, calculator overflow