Taryn Van Hemert

  What did you do in lab today? 1. How the phases of the moon occur? I am not extremely knowledgeable about the phases of the moon other than knowing that there are phases and that in the different phases the moon looks different because parts of it are shaded. 2. What causes the seasons? From my understanding, the different seasons are because of where the Earth is at in location to the sun and how the Earth is tilted. 3. What causes a lunar eclipse? A lunar eclipse is when the moon is perfectly in the Earth’s shadow so the moon is hidden/you can’t see it.  What was the big question? Geocentric: that the earth was in the center and that everything went around it.  Heliocentric: how the sun is in the middle and everything goes around the sun.  Copernicus: wrote a book about the sun being in the middle. Galileo: thrown in prison for believing that the sun was in the middle. Plane of the Ecliptic: all of the planets are on the same plane. Equinox: fall- September- 12 h...

   The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did.     Why is graphing important?  In lab today (9/18), we graphed our data from our swing experiment from lab last week. We made a scatter plot. We put Length of string (cm) on the x axis, and number of swings (period- back and forth) on the y axis. The picture below is our graph.  We did a pendulum lab simulation and got to mess around with different energy, friction, gravity on the pendulum to see what that would look like.  We are building a ground that will be safe enough for an egg to drop from a meter high without breaking. The egg is supposed to be a child and the ground is the ground of a playground. We are trying to find a ground that is safe for children to fall onto. For our ground we used a layer of sand, a layer of hay, another layer of sand, and then another layer of hay. From 1 meter, our egg did not break but did bounce out of the bowl. For our second experiment, fro...

  The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did.     What affects the period (period= time for a swing to go back and forth once) of a swing?  We taped a pencil onto the edge of the table and tied a string to the end of the pencil sticking off the end of the table. We tied an undone paper clip to the other end of the string. We then put one washer on the paper clip. We let go of the washer at the same height of the table. We let it swing for 15 seconds. We recorded the amount of periods of the swing in that time. We then added a washer and repeated. We did this until we had four washers on the paper clip. We found that the periods were the same for each weight. In conclusion, weight does not affect the period of a swing. This is because gravity pulls harder on more massive objects and more massive objects take more time to accelerate. These effects exactly cancel.    A description of what you learned in Thursday's lect ure .   ...

  The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did. What affects a rider’s speed down a slide? Create a fair test of your variable, gather evidence to support a claim about how your variable affects the speed of a rider.   This week we were told to pick a grade level and then decide what we would remove/add from our bucket of things for our students to experiment on based on their grade level. We decided to remove the mouse trap, rubber band, and the balloon. We wanted to add a bowl, pinwheel, and a golf ball. We then had to decide how we would organize the examples of motion worksheet for this grade level. We decided to add a graph to make it more organized and easier to read/use. We also had to pick a variable to test for things that can affect the speed of going down a slide. We chose to experiment with weight. We chose 3 different weights of blocks to go down the slide. We all guessed that the heavier block would be the fastest, but it ended up not bein...