Dot Physics

I already attacked the 2008 Punkin Chunkin Show. So, now I going to give the chunkers some tips. In case you aren’t familiar, the Punkin Chunkin contest has teams create devices to launch a pumpkin. They have different categories, but I am going to focus on the air-powered devices. The basic [...]

I don’t really know what that title actually means. So, I have been having problems with my PASCO projectile launcher devices. I will just call them launchers (they are really cannons). In my previous post, I looked at the launch speed from a launcher shot horizontally and vertically. The problem was [...]

The last time I looked at this projectile motion lab, I was confused. My different methods for measuring the launch speed of the ball were not even close to being consistent. So, I am bringing out the big guns – video. I made a video of the ball shot both horizontally off [...]

If you didn’t catch the latest MythBusters (yeah! new episodes), they did something straight from the physics textbooks. Just about every text has this example of shooting a bullet horizontally and dropping a bullet from the same height. The idea is that they should hit the ground at the same time. No [...]

There were a couple of things that bothered me about the MythBusters’ myth where they fired bullets in the air. The myth was that a bullet fired in the air could kill you. The first problem is that it is not a myth. There are several reported cases of people being killed [...]

This is really a lab that I have students do, but I am pretty sure they don’t read this blog – so it is ok. If they are reading this, hi!

We have these projectile cannons that shoot small balls. In order to look at projectile motion, they need to first determine the launch [...]

Thanks to Nick for showing me this video (Check out his blog – Fine Structure):

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Sciencegeekgirl is blogging from the AAPT. She talks about showing something interesting to get students thinking, and here is her example:

This reminds me of Dan Meyer’s What Can You Do With This stuff. Anyway, I can’t help it. I must analyze this video. Plus, Fran essentially threw down the gauntlet and [...]

Basically, Hancock gets upset with this boy and throws him in the air to scare him or something. In case you did not time it, the kid was in the air for 23 seconds. I claim that in order for Hancock to throw a person in the air for this long, the acceleration during throw would be deadly.

I made this screen cast for my algebra-based lab. Maybe you will find it useful also. This is a tutorial using Tracker Video Analysis (an awesome free program as I have said many times). In this tutorial I analyze a moving cart that shoots a ball up and lands back in the [...]