Week 5 Science Methods II

  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, from 2 meters up, we used the same ground, but added some thick felt fabric to the ground around the bowl for if the egg bounced out again. Unfortunately, the egg did break on impact. 

 A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture.

 Exam 1 

Answer questions about the weekly textbook reading:

1. 1. What did you learn? The different between a tire swing pendulum and a normal chain swing pendulum. 
   2. What was most helpful? It is so helpful seeing real-life examples of swings/pendulums. This helps to tie it all together and understand why we are even learning it. Children will learn better when you tie things to real-life examples also. 
   3. What do you need more information on? Something I don’t really understand is how clocks are pendulums. I don’t understand how the pendulum part makes a clock work. Maybe that is just for older grandfather clocks, so I don’t see them as often though. 
   4. What questions/concerns/comments do have? None!