3-25-09

Today is the twenty-fifth day of March, yet it does not exactly feel like spring. None-the-less the students of Mr. Manning fifth period physics class entered class prepared to learn. Today we would be continuing on our introduction to projectile motion. As we sat and started class we found that there would be no daily question today, many students had mixed feelings about this. Along with the fact that there was no homework to review from the previous day, it allowed us to move straight into completing the demos that we had started the other day. Everybody enjoys watching these demos and finds them interesting sometimes even hard to believe. But, after learning the physics behind them they all begin to make sense to each student. Our first demo involved Mr. Manning redoing the action he had us perform the previous day, involving a super ball and its horizontal motion. By doing this lab be confirmed that horizontal motion is uniform to the original velocity it experienced. Immediately following that demonstration Mr. Manning showed us this fact in another way. This demo involved a automated ball launcher. As the ball launcher was moving it launched a small ball into the air. Although the cart did not stop the ball landed in the opening for the cart. Oddly enough when the cart was stopped after launching the call the ball continued moving forward and missed the opening of the cart. Through this demo we learned that vertical motion accelerates at the rate do to gravity and horizontal motion is uniform to the initial velocity do to the outside force creating it.