Week 4 Blog Post

In the lab for week 4, we talked a lot about friction and forces. We were reminded that friction is the force that opposes sliding across a surface. Well, today we modeled the question in the lab through investigation in the lab that asked, "What affects how long it takes a swing to go back and forth?". So today in the lab we designed an investigation that had us test this theory out. My group claimed that the faster we push the swing the quicker it will go back and forth. We effectively proved that to be true with our data. We noticed that when we bumped the swing the time it took to go 10 swings took a lot longer then when we pushed the swing harder.

In a lecture for week 4, we talked a lot about force and Newton's First Law. I was reminded that Newton's First Law states that without an external force, an object will maintain its speed and direction of motion. Then we went into Newton's second law. Newton's Second law states that larger masses are harder to accelerate. So a smaller mass will be easier to accelerate is what it is saying. We then moved our focus to thinking about energy and what this looks like within science concepts. For example, they said that more speed also equals more kinetic energy!

Textbook Reading-

I learned a lot of beneficial information relating to the pendulums and how this transfers to its outcomes of energy. For example, I took way three main things here. The first is that at the starting pointing of the swing, the pendulum has potential energy which is also known as the energy held by an object that gives it the capacity to do work. As for when the pendulum swings downward, I learned that the potential energy that we talked about earlier is actually converted to kinetic energy here which is known as the energy of an object due to motion taking place. Lastly, the final part that I really learned here was that when the pendulum swings upward in the end, the previous kinetic energy we just gained goes back to potential energy!

I thought the images and videos in the textbook reading were very helpful in clearly laying everything out for myself! One example is the video on pendulum waves and what this all really means. While I watched this it helped me through what I was watching at that time. It also taught me again how different weights, angles of release, and lengths of strings affect the pendulum. All my previous questions were answered in the text today, so no more additional questions!