WELCOME to Physics, a class taught by Mrs. Chase! In Physics class, we learn all about how the world works --- from calculating velocities and accelerations with Kinematics to figuring out what happens when you smash two blocks together really fast, Physics is super fun! Personally, I enjoy the physical Labs that we get to do once in a while. They are a great way to not only have fun with Physics, but see some of the real-world impacts of the theoretical work that we are doing in class!
Here is one of the labs that we have gotten to do in Physics so far this year - the "Dynamics Lab"! In this Lab, we
got to make our own researchable question to analyze regarding Atwood's machines, which we were learning at the time in
Physics. My group chose to research this question: "How does having one of the masses of a modified Atwood's machine be
on an inclined plane affect the acceleration of the carts?" Doing the lab was super fun, and I got to learn a lot from it,
so that's a win-win situation. You can read through the paper as shown here to gauge the sort of work that we do in Physics here at
MAMS!
If you have already looked at the Math Modeling page, you might recognize the "POW" phrase. Well, Math isn't the only course where
we sometimes do POWs! For this POW, we were asked to first find the distance a puck would land after falling from a ramp on a certain height and angle,
and then were asked to maximize this distance by optimizing the angle of the ramp.
This POW was super fun, and it was super cool looking at all of the
different ways that people approached the problem.
Even in our group, we tried out multiple different strategies just to make sure we had the correct answer.
Not only did we do some "trial and error" in an Excel spreadsheet, we also mathematically derived an equation for the distance and then used Calculus to
find the point that made the derivative 0 (which is in this case, the maximum)!
Overall, this was a super fun POW, and I hope you learn something from
reading through it!