danaleeling

This term the measurement of the downslope force was improved by tying a loop of jute twine to a post. Board ahead of RipStik run Ahead of class my mass and the mass of the RipStik were measured. The twine was also already prepared, attached to a post on the west side about halfway up the 21 meter run. The spoed trap was kept on the slope at the same length as last week: 1.8 meters. Data after the run. The downslope time was stopped at top of speed trap. By keeping the speed trap on the slope there were no losses to friction. The change in momentum took 15.411 seconds for 21 meters minus 1.8 meters, a 19.2 meter run. Five timers were deployed on the 1.8 meter on-slope speed trap. Four stopwatches and a cell phone. The median time was used in the velocity calculation.  Spreadsheet For g, which wasn't strictly necessary, the median time of experimental results was used in keeping with the spirit of the course. The new spring scale arran...

A ten meter distance was marked off in front of the south faculty building ahead of class. At 08:40 I started making runs and gathering data.  Online metronomes were used after the eighth run to target gaps in the data. Class was a cold open on the sidewalk. Attendance was whomever showed up. After run 15 we returned to the classroom.  There the data was brought up on the Smartboard. Spreadsheet The extra duration in data gathering improved the sense of scatter. The correlation will come in at 0.87 and a coefficient of determination of 0.76. 

As with all of my blogs, the audience for this post is a single person, me. I use blogs as notes I can consult in the future to determine how I accomplished something, and provide a place to record formulas I used to solve particular problems. In this case I needed to connect grade exports from Moodle to class exports from MyShark to produce a list of students on early warning. As the target audience is my future self, these notes are necessarily abbreviated and may be missing steps that I know intuitively. That said, this might benefit someone somewhere when dealing with related complications. I needed advisor information for each student which is only available from an extended student data export in MyShark. I also needed grades from the Grades: Export menu in each course. Note that the export menu link is the same except for the course ID, so link editing can jump one from one export screen to another directly. If a course has multiple sections, then Groups have to be previously se...

This term a Thursday holiday turned the banana leaf marble ramp laboratory into a Wednesday demonstration using a Hot Wheels car and track . Rather than do the smorgasbord of equations approach of spring 2025, Friday was used to replicate the Wednesday demonstration but used the RipStik on the sloped sidewalk. Three heights were set up with vertical drops of 11 cm, 28 cm, and 37 cm. Eleven centimeters was on the pillar base. Twenty-eight centimeters was at the bottom of the post. The nuts actually proved useful in tensioning the line. Thirty-seven centimeters was on top of flanges. This measurement has come in at higher values in the past. Fall 2024 the height from 21 meters was measured as being 0.7 meters or 70 centimeters.  The first double set corresponded to the 11 centimeter drop. Twenty-eight cm Lines hooked on a nut to clear the sidewalk. Based on an image from fall 2024 , the launch this ...

This term a holiday took out the week four banana leaf marble ramp laboratory day. With the first five weeks deeply interconnected and building from day-to-day, losing lab four was particularly problematic. Momentum was moved to Monday and laboratory four was done as a demonstration on Wednesday. Laboratory four attempts to demonstrate that gravitational potential energy becomes kinetic energy. Height above the table is graphed against velocity at the bottom of the ramp. Set-up took 40 minutes, tape, scissors, and the Hot Wheels sets.  The original cars were long gone, a new car was purchased and unpackaged only in class.  The top of the rig was affixed to the overhead track using copious amounts of tape. The finishing gate was also taped down after being pulled to provide a small amount of tension on the track. Timing for velocity calculations was done on the last 180 cm of track. Timer start was at the 180 cm mark. ...