4cm Incline Lab Report

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On Tuesday in lab, we wanted to measure the velocity and acceleration of a ball rolling down an incline. To do this, we made our table have an incline by putting wood blocks under two legs of the table. We placed meter sticks on a table so we could determine the distance the ball traveled for a certain amount of time. We placed the ball at the 0cm mark on the meter stick and let go of the ball so it could roll down the table. To make our results more accurate, we videoed the ball rolling down the table with a stopwatch on our phone following the ball. We then went through the video and paused it at every 10cm and recorded the time it took for each 10cm interval from 0cm to 150cm. We did this experiment with 2cm, 4cm, and 6cm inclines to show …show more content…

time graph, and an acceleration vs. time graph. We made graphs with our information from the 4cm and 6cm inclines and excluded our information from the 2cm incline since our data was not very accurate for that specific trial. It was most likely not very accurate because the incline was so small that it did not really have an effect on the ball. We found the velocity from our data by using the formula change in distance/change in time, and then found the acceleration by taking the change in velocity/change in time. After creating our graphs with the data, we found the position time graph was an upward curve. This makes since because as the time increases, the distance the ball has traveled increases at a higher rate. The graphs for the velocity resemble a diagonal line, a constant rate. This makes sense because as the time increases, the velocity increases at a constant rate. For example, the ball is moving at a higher velocity at 3 seconds than it was at 1 second. We also found that as the incline increases, the velocity increases. The ball goes faster as it rolls down the incline because of acceleration. The graphs for acceleration should be a constant number, a straight horizontal line on a graph. We know this because if you take

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