Week 5 Lab

 


  1. The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did.

This week in lab we touched on swings, and why you need to push a child to keep going back and forth on the swing. We looked at the pendulum simulation and played around with that, then zooming into that with an energy lens the pendulum slows down because it collides with air particles, speeding them up and slowing the pendulum down. The collisions transfer from the pendulum to the air. You need to keep pushing a child on a swing to keep them going due to the collisions with air particles (which transfer energy from the rider to the surrounding air), and pushing transfers energy back to the rider as they speed up. We revisited our big question for the module- “how can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?”, and looked at the different physics concepts related to types of play. Races and describing motion, slides and the force lens, swings and force and energy lenses, and then surfaces with a force and energy lense. We investigated our last question of the physics module,” How can we design a safe and durable playground surface?”. We looked at a visual of Engineering Design Processes and talked about how to utilize that kind of learning in class. Then we got into designing our playground surface. Now–other than our broken egg 🙁, we did not have many pictures from this lab. Both of our eggs broke. When the landed onto the surface they were initially fine. But then the egg bounced out! The hard surface of the floor is what broke our eggs. We tried to redesign, so that our egg wouldn’t break. But, to no avail. Our design did not work because the surface itself did not have much bounce back, the material ( and egg) went flying everywhere. 

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

Exam week!

  1. Answer questions about the weekly textbook reading:

No textbook reading!

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