This week was all about momentum and energy transfer. We have a project that is due on thursday that involves us making a Newtons Cradle to demonstrate what we are learning. We also worked with the cars on the track to demonstrate how momentum is transferred to another object.
Momentum is the movement after a force has been applied to an object. So if I push a ball on the floor and nothing else pushes the ball afterward, its momentum is carrying it. We also did work with "Momentum Blocks". You take the velocity of the object in meters/seconds and put that one side of the block and then you take the mass in kilograms and put it on the other side and multiply them. That is how you get your momentum in kg/meters/second.
This project that we are doing will be a good way to demonstrate transfer of momentum. The more rigid the spheres are, the better the transfer. I know that if you apply a force to a sphere (in this case gravity) it will hit the sphere next to it and start a transfer in momentum until it reaches the last sphere which isn't blocked by anything. This is where it gets its motion from.
This week we also worked with the cars on the tracks to demonstrate what the transfer of momentum looked like with two things that could freely move and weren't blocked by anything. We pushed one car into the other and observed what happened. What happened was usually the car that was hit would take off and the other car would stop completely. This is because the car that was hit took all of the energy and left the other car with nothing.
I think that this week was very succesful. I believe that I got everything that was taught to me. I'm pretty sure that I had some trouble with certain things on the exam, but I think I did fairly well, just by judging from taking the test.
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