Introductory Section:
|Rubber Band car Material|
Our first car, the original, it was made of two CDs, one skewer, modified 5"x5" cardboard piece, and duct tapes.
What are rubber band cars? They are car that are powered by band and they roll on two CDs. These two CDs function as wheels of the car and are attached to a skewer which is the axle. We are allowed to attach these two components using only duct tape.
How we make a rubber band car? How they work?
How do they work? First, we cut a "1 1/2 by 2" square in the middle bottom of the cardboard piece. Then we have the skewer go through the corrigation in the cardboard and put it in between the gap that we cut in the cardboard. We would tape the disc to the skewer, so it wouldn't fall off, but not a lot since we'll still want it to rotate. Above the place where we cut the cardboard, we tape one side of the rubbeband so, it would stick to the car and still be able to create energy. How we power our car? Well we put one side of the band on top of the skewer. Next, we would spin the skewer to wind up the rubberband, but not too much and this could create potential energy. Later, we would release the skewer, so we record how far our original rubber car can go and after that, we try to find the problem and try to find a modification for it.
[Velocity and Acceleration]
Velocity is a cars speed over a course of time. This speed can be in any direction. The velocity is calculated by finding an item's change in position and dividing that by the amount of time it took to change that much position. For our final car that we talk about below it reached a top velocity of two meters per second.
Acceleration is the car's increase of speed over a period of time. To find this we chose two points on the graph below then calculated the acceleration using the formula. When testing a moving object you always want to know it's acceleration to see how fast it gets to it's top speed and at what rate.
HOW WE USED THE VIDEO PHYSICS APP TO ANALYZE THE VELOCITY AND ACCELERATION?
Well, we used it to try to find the most accurate graph on its speed and distance by first recording a video of the rubber band car running from start to end. As you can see under us, it's the formula that we used to get the answer we seek.
Why did it have to be that recording angle? We recorded it in that camera view because we want to be able to record and see the car going from start to the finish line, so we can later analyze it and make a graph, in order to calculate its velocity and acceleration. We also made a measurement scale, so we could see how much the car had to travel. The measurement we used was one meter.
