Not a Happy Rain

Wow, is today dreary... luckily, we're studying motion which is FUN FUN FUN!!!

Ok, enough of that. B and E Blocks entered into a discussion of accelerated motion. Acceleration, the rate of change of velocity, can occur either through a change of speed or direction. We'll concentrate on the speed change for now, but remember the direction piece when we hit circular motion. We took time to look at acceleration conceptually, graphically and with equations and began to creep into a full kinematics discussion that we'll hit tomorrow for E Block and on Friday for B Block. Tomorrow, for B Block, is a lab that will let you examine the position-time and velocity-time graphs we've discussed and you will use them to interpret the motion of a ball in free fall - our next topic of study.

C Block conducted their Ball Toss lab and got very good results. The software provides position-time, velocity-time and acceleration-time graphs for a single piece of motion, so the movement of the ball through the air could be visualized and analyzed in a variety of ways. Consider the shape of each graph and make sure you explain them in your lab conclusions. Why do I expect the velocity/time graph to be nicely linear, for example... we'll go over the lab tomorrow before diving into a deeper study of acceleration. We'll hit the special circumstance of acceleration due to gravity a little later in the chapter.

F Block began their discussion of motion with an introduction to frame of reference and a few basic descriptors of motion. We took special care to distinguish the vector quantities (displacement and velocity) from the scalar ones (distance and speed) and make sure that, for tonight's homework, you include direction with your answers if the value is a vector. Tomorrow, we'll add another descriptor of motion - acceleration and then use all three on Friday to examine how we can use math to describe and make predictions about motion through the use of the kinematics formulas.

Maybe it will have stopped raining by then...