Week 5

 In this week's lab we wrapped up our thoughts about swings from last week. We learned that pendulums collide with air particles, speeding them up and slowing down the pendulum. These collisions transfer energy from the pendulum to the air. This week our big question was, how can we design a safe and durable playground surface? To test this question we developed surfaces made out of different materials and dropped an egg on these surfaces to see if it would crack. If the egg cracked we knew that the surface was too hard for children to be playing on. 

Test 1: 

For our first test we place sand, saran wrap, hay, and then rubber in a bowl we tested to see if their mixture of material would make a good surface first by using a tennis ball. We held the tennis ball up 1 meter over the bowl and dropped it. We thought that this mixture would be good, so we moved onto dropping the eggs. The egg did not crack when it fell into the bowl but the egg did bounce out and cracked on the floor. 

Test 2: 

For our second test we changed our mixture. Instead we did sand, then saran wrap, and then hay. We thought the softer mixture would work better. We also dropped this egg from 2 meters instead of 1. The egg did not break when it hit the bowl but it bounced out again and broke when it hit the floor. 

When looking at these tests with an energy lens, we learned that too much force breaks an egg. The more gradually the egg slows down the smaller the force. We learned that Newton’s third law states that forces come in equal pairs. So when things are hitting each other they compress the same.  




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