The Rate of Motion

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Fall 2009-Day 14

Force and Motion Activities

The students tried to model the idea that mass does not affect the rate at which objects fall by using motion detectors. Students had a slanted track with a cart on it. They put the motion detector at the bottom of the track. Students pushed the cart up and let gravity pull it back down towards the motion detector. A graph showed up on the computer screen. The students repeated this with a different cart that had extra weight on it. The motion detector was not reading the motions very well and the graph looked like a bunch of random jagged lines. If the carts had not gotten derailed, and the motion detector was accurately placed, the two graphs that showed up with the cart and the cart with weights would've looked almost exactly the same. This would have shown that gravity affects objects of different masses the same.