Feeling the Motion

Introductory Physics spent the long block working on their Graph Matching lab. Folks had to interact with prepared graphs of motion and enact the motion they described. A motion detector tracked their movements and plotted them against the prepared plot to see how the people did matching their motions to the graph. Both position/time and velocity/time graphs were enacted and students also had the opportunity to create their own graphs and have groupmates try and match their directions. We'll go over these labs tomorrow and make sure that everyone is comfortable interpreting basic graphs of motion.

Physics A and B started their work with vectors today by examining the nature of vectors and the graphical method of vector addition. Vectors will be an important part of this year's work, so a firm hand dealing with vector topics is necessary for success in the class. We practiced how to create vector diagrams to scale using rulers and protractors and determining the resultant through direct measurement. Tomorrow, we'll start to add mathematical tools to combining vectors. If folks aren't up-to-date with the Pythagorean Theorem and the use of the tangent function, you'll get a thorough review tomorrow.

Honors Physics spent extra time yesterday working with non-perpendicular vectors, so today was horizontal projectile day. We looked at properties of projectile motion, in general, and worked with the math of evaluating horizontally-launched projectiles. Tomorrow, we'll add projectiles launched at an angle to our list of skills and then move to the area of relative motion. We've actually talked about that a lot, but this time we'll work with it mathematically with vectors.