On The Road Again

We're back in the swing, and swing is a very appropriate term for our current chapter - vibrations and waves. B, C and E Blocks discussed the characteristics of simple harmonic motion and examined how mass-spring and pendulum systems demonstrate this pretty well. Make sure you can describe what is happening to kinetic energy, potential energy, restoring force, acceleration, velocity and displacement during an oscillation cycle for both of those systems. We took time to show how Hooke's Law satisfies the relationship that restoring force is proportional to displacement for spring systems and for B and C Blocks, harkened back to our lab on conservation of energy for simple harmonic motion to further nail down these ideas. Tomorrow, B and C begin looking a other physical descriptors of simple harmonic motion such as period and frequency and how they can be measured/calculated. E Block will start on their Pendulum Periods lab...

...which is what F Block worked on today. The period of an oscillation is the amount of time required to make one full trip back to the start (crossing equilibrium twice). Period is measured in seconds and we'll look more closely at its relationship to frequency (the number of oscillations per second) in a couple of days. Groups tested three physical features of a pendulum that might influence period: mass, amplitude and length. Tomorrow, we'll graph out our data and draw some conclusions. Then its on to looking at other features of pendulum motion that the other sections hit today.