My teacher said that this week, instead of having another discussion on motion before the Thanksgiving break (even though he does agree that we need more), he decided to let us "make" action movies. Apparently he loves them, so he came up with three different scenarios for us to chose from.
The Rules
My teacher decided on giving us a set of rules so that this wouldn't be too easy. They are as follows:
- You only get one shot at it, and if you screw up, "you'll never work in this town again!"
- You cannot test it out beforehand.
- You must follow your scenario exactly, meaning that, if it gives you measurements, you must use them.
- Your two cars will be at different speeds.
- You cannot run both cars at the same time. Only one can run. Otherwise, you will be disqualified.
- If you make the two cars crash and you follow the scenario, you will "have your people call his people."
Our Scenario
My group and I decided to chose scenario number 1. In this scenario, we had to have two cars come at each other from two different directions. They MUST be 2 meters away from the crash point, but we get to decide at what time we should start each car.
Of course, one car was slower and one car was faster. To make it a bit more comical, we decided to name the slower car Grandma and the faster car something about speed. I can't remember the real name we came up for him, except for the fact that I called him Speedy McSpeedson.
Our Process
To find out how fast each of the cars went, we decided to measure how much time it took for each car to travel 1 meter. We then doubled it to see how much time it took for 2 meters. For each car, we actually recorded the time 5 different times to make it more accurate, and then we found the average.
- Grandma: 1 meter= 5.6 seconds, 2 meters= 11.2 seconds
- Speedy McSpeedson: 1 meters= 4.26 seconds, 2 meters= 8.52 seconds
From this data, you can obviously tell that Speedy was faster than Grandma. However, we actually got stumped on what to do next. Eventually, we figured out that all you had to do was subtract the two times to find out when to release the second car. We did 11.2- 8.52 and found that the answer was 2.7 seconds, meaning that we needed to release Speedy McSpeedson 2.7 seconds after we released Grandma.
In the End...
In the end, we ended up succeeding and causing the cars to crash. It felt good to have gotten it right. I'm very happy that I got to work with my group. They all did a great job trying to figure out the answer, and everyone in the class, including myself, had a great time. Personally, I would like to do another activity like this one again.
Hey Lisette, I loved how you used direct quotes in your blog, it makes it a lot easier to make connections, I also like how you explained how you came to your conclusion. That is helping me out a lot, my group kind of split into two groups and while one went low tech with pencil, paper, and graphs my group went high tech. with calculators. The low tech won out though and got it right. My one question for you though is if you had to explain you scenario and the math behind it with one of the 3 graphs we learned which one would you use and why. I ask this because this is supposed to be an extension of the discussions we have been having and my mini-group could not figure this out to save our souls (it would have helped it the tech understood what we meant it to do)
ReplyDeleteThank you Jeff so much, and I see what you guys did. To answer your question, I'm going to assume that by the three graphs you mean the velocity vs. time, position vs. time, and motion maps. Tell me if I'm wrong by the way, but personally I would think that you would and could use a combination of all three, although some would be more helpful than others. I think that both a velocity vs. time graph and a position vs. time graph would be very helpful. I would use the velocity vs. time graph to figure out their velocities and how different they are. Then, I would use the position vs. time graph to figure out what time you should release the other car. This would be the point at which the lines intersect. However, since they must both be two meters apart from the crash site, you would probably have to guess and check to find your answer. I hope this helped and let me know if you have any other questions.
DeleteIt did lisette and I know that's going to be the point of all of this, is to combine all three to do the same tasks. One thing though, maybe there is some way to do all of this on a graphing calculator, just be a little careful because when we tried that something funky happened
DeleteThere definitely has to be. It probably has to do something with graphing lines like you told me earlier. I know for my scenario that it would probably be graphing two lines and then seeing where they intersect, and I'm thinking that might be what it would be for your scenario too. I think you should bring that up tomorrow if we have a group discussion. It would definitely be something good to talk about. I'll keep thinking and let you know if I think of anything.
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