Week 11

This week was short, and we had the spaghetti bridge lab, were you had to make a suitable bridge made out of spaghetti. Your goal was to make a light but sturdy bridge, able to hold up as much weight as much as possible. My bridge was sturdy, just not enough room. The physics behind it was a little confusing for me to understand, but the bridge has the earth and weights pulling it down and the "desks" pushing it up. It was a fun project, but i could have put more time, instead of stressing out and waiting till the last minute.

Week 10 Physics

This week in physics we centered around the idea of component forces, force pairs, and force diagrams. Before we talked about how a component force is north and east, and the force would be going in the northeast direction. A big idea, that we stressed were force pairs. which are two equal but opposite forces, shown in this picture, which is .. kinda cute 
We reviewed chapter 6, for our assessment on Friday. An example from our review is (6.2) A sky diver falls at a constant terminal velocity due to air resistance with no
parachute. Explain the sky diver's motion in terms of the forces acting on her.
-Because the air resistance is pushing up on the sky diver as
much as the Earth pulls down on her, the forces are balanced
and she falls with a constant velocity.

Week 8 - Physics

It's the end of the quarter! This week we focused on force diagrams, with different situations. We discussed that if the object is moving the velocity is not constant. The main difference from this week and last week is that the forces that are pushing or pulling, are now at an angle. This changes EVERYTHING. Not really, but for the most part, it changes how the force diagram looks, and we also discover forces that are acting on the object that we wouldn't normally have thought of, like..  If the object is pulled by a force at an angle to the surface with some friction, the force is coming from the north east, so the component forces are north and east! A component force is a force which, acting conjointly with one or more forces, produces the effect of a single force. The component forces for figure 5.1 is ay and ax.











Another subject we learned about was inertia. The best way to think about what inertia is that when you throw a ball in a parabolic trajectory, your hand isn't pushing the ball all the way until it's in the hoop, that's inertia. Something very important to remember about inertia is that it isn't a force.
Along with the other subjects, another tid bit of information that we received was that if an object is pushed by a force applied downward at an angle, the table has  to push up more, so the block feels heavier. Terminal velocity is when an object is speeding up until it hits a certain velocity and continues at that constant velocity.
This all comes together, with understanding forces. The different labs that we did helped to understand all about forces, and makes it easier  to comprehend what is going on.