Briannas' Blog

In science we are currently studying Physics. To add additional knowledge to our our understanding of Physics, we used Hot wheels to measure speed. We all had launchers and hot wheel tracks. We could have the car go as much distance as we wanted to before we stopped our timers. But, in the end we all had to have the distance in the ratio measure to a meter. In my group with Charmaine, Ruby, and Sherif, we had our cars go 2 meters before we stopped the timer. We did this because it gave the timer more time to react, because our cars were going really fast. My cars average speed was 3.636363 meters per second. This calculation was made by doing the experiment five times, not counting the times where we messed up. Really though, this experiment wasn’t exactly going to be precise. We could have gotten the timing wrong, the distance could cause negative acceleration, the masses of the car could have effected it, the functioning of the wheels, and the tracks could have larger gaps or a slight change in density. A interesting topic was brought up in class was about how air effected the cars. When you think about air, what you most think about is the density of the air and whether the car is blockish and makes the air force it to stop more than a smaller car would. That does effect the car, but another thing that also can change results is the temperature of the room. When it is warmer, it causes metal to expand, so that could really have impact with the speed of the car. Although, the expeiriment was never going to be precise, we learned about what impacted the change in speeds and I feel like I learned a lot in this experiment and had a great time with it. I posted my photo of my hot wheel car separately.