Galileo

Title: Acceleration Of A Propelled Laboratory Car

Purpose: The purpose is to cause a lab-car to accelerate, make sure that it does and then mathematically find the acceleration of laboratory car.

Materials: One laboratory car (the one without the spring), paper-tape timer, a ruler, a round carbon disc, several meter-long pieces of paper tape, a piece of tape, three textbooks of a thicker width, two smooth planks of wood or plastic and a stopwatch to test the paper-time timer.

Procedure: First gather all necessary materials on the smooth surface you have selected. Put the carbon disc on the appropriate spot on the paper-tape timer; this will make for visible dots. Slide a meter-long piece of paper-tape through the paper-tape timer. Turn on the paper-tape timer and using the stopwatch, begin timing and pulling the tape quickly towards yourself. Stop both the timer and the stopwatch after two seconds and count the dots; you should count sixty (or close to sixty) dots per second. If this is accurate, you are free to continue. If this is not, find a new paper-tape timer as the one you are currently using seems to be damaged. Next, assemble a ramp

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While this was a human error, it was chiefly unpreventable; however, those first four points were omitted from the acceleration graph. 3474” because it is the “m” value (slope is the “m” value in an equation where y = mx + b).

Conclusions:

Upon concluding this experiment, a graph could be charted that showed the acceleration of the laboratory car as it traveled down the ramp.

Data:

Upon counting twenty dots (each dot representing 1/60 of a second) the following table could be created:

Time (1/60sec) Distance (cm)

1 0. Now, select a meter-long piece of paper-tape and tape it to the bottom (not the top!) part of your laboratory car. There could be microscopic fragments of the plastic that are higher than others, which may cause the car to brief slow down.

Approximate Word count = 787
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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