Personal Narrative: Gun Control Laws

The first thing my group did was confirm our method of taking data and who would be doing it as well as defining out independent and dependent variables. Since we would be directly controlling the net force we made that our independent variable which left the acceleration as our dependent variable because it was a factor that varying as a result of our net force. We weighed our cart with every single mass in it along with the string and the hook which turned out to be 1.97kg. We did not add anything else to our system after this to keep the mass of the whole system constant. Our setup was like this: a ramp was sitting on top of the table, parallel to it so it had no slant. On one end of the ramp, a pulley was attached. On the other side of the ramp, a motion sensor was set up so it faced directly down the path of the

Doing it this way allowed the cart to stay on the track and produce better results, and the cart did not get damaged. Once Isha stopped the cart, we took a look at the slope of the velocity time graph on the computer and recorded the acceleration of the system from the slope of the line. Since the end of the graph got all wacky and out of control at the end from when the cart stopped, we selected only the best, straightest part of the graph to take the acceleration from in order to get the best possible results. We also had Allison start the motion sensor before I let go of the cart, because we found that doing anything else (starting the cart before the motion sensor or having them go at the same time) produced pretty ugly graphs which were not easy to take data from and would overall not be very accurate data. There was also a small rubber stopper on the back of the cart which I used when I pulled the cart back. I brought the cart back far enough so that the stopper rested on the motion sensor, and I did this every time so that the cart always started at the same place (the motion sensor stayed in pretty much the same place the whole time as