Week 5 Blog

        This week, we focused on what playground surfaces would be safe for kids to play on. We were given an egg and told to make a surface that would prevent the egg from cracking after dropping it by 1 meter, and then 2 meters. The surface we decided to go with was straw and sand. At first, we put a lot of sand with a little bit of straw, and the egg bounced off and landed on the floor and cracked. After that, we took more sand out and added more straw. We then got a new egg to try again. This caused a safer landing for the egg with both heights of drops!

    On Thursday we will take a test on the entire unit we have just learned. Therefore, I feel that this is going to wrap up and summarize everything we have done so far this semester. It is going to be a little bit of a reminder of everything we have learned since the first week. It is going to go over everything we have discussed in the lab and lectures, and in the experiments we have conducted! I have learned a lot in this class, and I am excited about getting started on our next unit next week!

From previous week's textbook readings, I feel there is a lot of connection to that within our discussions this week. I learned that the kinetic energy, which is talked about within the press book chapter that has the example of the pendulum, relates how the texture of the playground is. It is helpful to think about kinetic and potential energy when we drop the egg. Before we drop the egg, the egg will have potential energy, but after we drop it, that is when the kinetic energy comes into play. The first time we dropped the egg, and it hit the ground, it continued to bounce off of our bowl and hit the ground and cracked. The kinetic energy kept going, but once we made adjustments, the potential energy came back way sooner than it did the first time. 

                                   




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