Year 12 physics EPI (Australia)

[paronga]

Hi guys, well if you can't tell from the thread name, ill explain what this is all about.

 

I am studying year 12 physics in victoria, as one of my sacs (Student assessed course work) i need to do an EPI (extended personal investiagtion) on the topic of motion. What this thread is about was if anybody out there with a physics mind would be able to help me with an idea of what to do, you see because i appear to be in abit of trouble. The prac work has to be done this comming Sat 25th of feb, i know i have left it late, but i thought by now i'd have a good prac to do. I was wrong, so i need abit of help.

 

Now a little information on the actual prac, i have 4 hours to do a prac (which i can be one i made up, or an already well known prac) and the 4 hours to write it up in class time. The prac can include anything which is in these topics:

 

* Newtons 3 laws

* Kinamatic equations

* Projectile motion

* Momentum

* Impulse

* Conservation of momentum

* Energy (kenetic)

* Energy (gravatational potential)

* Work (change in energy)

* Conservation of energy

* Hooke's law

* Elastic potential energy

* Circular motion

 

 

It has been sugested to me that i re-do a past experiment which will be easy to follow and understand so that i can get the best results (this counts to my ENTER score). The idea behind doing a past experiment is that i will know what should happen, and if its a well known one, there should be plenty of outside information on it to help me write a good discussion on it.

 

My school will have most the equipment and data recording instuments i need, and if needed i can buy some simple stuff that they dont hard, but keeping it simple would be nice.

 

Thank you for your input, and please, can we keep the usless spam in this thread to a minimum.

 

-Paronga

[timo]

In a similar situation I did an experiment with two masses hanging on springs as shown in the sketch I attached to this message. What we did was measuring the movenent of m2 for different starting conditions and compare it with out calculated predictions.

 

However, seeing that you bother about the grade you get and that you only have two days left, it´s possibly not a good choice for you:

a) The experiment might look very simple but the components we used were far from optimal. It took us three hours to construct the experiment in a way that we could at least take some data.

b) The math involved is very interesting but it might be a bit too much to learn within two days.

c) In practice, things you just didn´t take into account happen. Your predictions just don´t hit the data very well (the first two or three oscillations went fine, afterwards only the shape seemed similar). You´ll need a discussion of how good your predictions are.

 

So why did I say above? Well, I told you what experiment I did so that maybe it inspires you. I told you about a few problems we had to warn you not to underestimate simple-looking experiments.

[zebov]

Shoot a bullet into a block of wood hanging by a wire and then determine the velocity of the bullet by the swing of the wood after the bullet is implanted in it. This is a very common experiment and applies a lot of the topics you provided. You should be able to find plenty of info on this on the internet. I know this is probably too late, but if you're in dier need of SOMEthing, this may be something you could whip up rather quickly (and maybe throw a dart instead of shooting a gun?)

[CPL.Luke]

or use a spring launcher and then measure the k value of the spring, bit more complex, but it would probably be worth a good grade.

[Frogman]

Hi, I'm from Australia (Victoria) too and also studying Year 12 Physics. I am ranked against you in the ENTER score, but SACs do not determine the ranking between us, it only affects our ranking between our class mates. So this is why I am going to help you (I know its probably too late), but it will be useful for future Unit 3 and 4 Physics students. Our teacher gave us three types of experiments we could do. The one I did was the coefficient of restitution which is relevant to change in kenitic energy, momentum/Impulse, and newton's third law. It consisted of bouncing three different balls (varying mass) from up to 6 different heights. We recorded the balls' path with a camera (with a ruler in the background to measure the height of the ball) (Teachers like to see discussions of certain errors ie parralax error, in your report). We recorded height dropped from and height bounced to and then plotted the data on a graph and found it was already linear. You can figure the rest out for yourselves.