Unit 2 Reflection!

Wait... what! We've finished another unit! ALREADY! Where is the time going? Mrs. Lawrence that should be the next question we handle, where is the time?

As much as I hate to say it, I'm not sad to see this unit go, too much math for my tastes and it was really confusing. Nevertheless, I'll try to summarize it in a manner that makes more sense than the unit did to me. It's going to be intense, are you ready? Alright, let's go.

Fade In: Unit Two of the Asheville School Physics experience. First order of business, Newton's Second Law.

Newton’s second law states that force is directly proportional to acceleration and mass is inversely proportional to acceleration.

 a=f/m

From Newton's Second Law we found our way to Free Fall (excluding air resistance of course). 

An object in free fall has a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 (or 10 as we used it). 

LAB TIME: We used this nifty number to calculate the height of third Anderson by dropping a ball multiple times from the third floor and taking the average time it took to reach the ground. We then used that average time and using the equation d=1/2gt^2 solved for the distance of the building. My group was the most accurate, we found, because we did not throw out any data that seemed too high or too low, a good lesson for future lab projects!

And then it started to get funky and this little villain called math came in and crushed my physics hopes and dreams. Alright, maybe that's a bit dramatic, but Projectile Motion sure caused some grief.Projectile motion is the term used when something is pushed with a force and is thrown through the air. For example: When an airplane drops supplies over a troubled area. It is important to remember that projectile motion uses both horizontal and vertical motion and that objects in projectile motion travel in a parabolic path (like a Parabola!)

Horizontal motion: constant velocity 

V=D/T

Vertical motion: constant acceleration

 d=1/2gt^2

And finally, duh duh duh..... AIR RESISTANCE. Air Resistance is the force exerted by the air on a falling object to balance out the force of speed and acceleration. As an object falls, air resistance increases with speed and decreases with acceleration until the object reaches terminal velocity (or equilibrium where all the forces are equal and opposite).  

Air Resistance: Fnet/m=a.

As I stated in the beginning, the most difficult challenge I faced in this Unit was the math part, math and science don't translate well together for me. So I hit a lot of problems in that.

I'm still working to overcome this disconnect and I hope throughout the year I will get better at this!