The Buggy Lab

"One, two, three, four, five, mark" is what I kept on repeating to my lab partners last Thursday. Yep, you guessed it, we were doing the Buggy Lab! Before I tell you what happened in this lab, here are two things you need to know-

•Reference Point-a chosen/ set point, which determines your position. 

•Position- where you are compared to the set point. 

Now I can begin!

With the help of two other partners- Brad and Julia, we were on a mission to answer the question, How does the time a car travels affect its position? We quickly found a small spot, but quickly realized that we would need a much bigger space because of how fast the blue buggy moved. So, we moved outside to the hallway. Our team decided on our positions in the lab. I would be the timekeeper, who would count with a stopwatch, and count up to 20. We marked our reference point and started the buggy. Every multiple of 5, Julia would mark with a sticky note, where the buggy was at that time. When I finished counting up to 20, Brad counted using cm, how far each sticky note was away from our reference point. He determined each sticky note's position. 

Here's what our results were.

Time(sec)     Position(cm)

5.                          193

10                          375.5

15.                         566.5

20.                         762.5

Mr. Battlagia then juiced up our experiment a little more. We had to move our reference point 50 cm forward, and start there with our buggy. But we had to include the length of the previous reference point. I know it sounds really complicated, but all we did was start the buggy 50 cm. forward. Not that bad!

Here were our results:

Time(sec).           Position(cm)

5                               254

10.                             439

15.                                634

20.                                830

I was actually surprised by our results for the data table above. I thought that the position would only increase 50 cm. from the first data table's position. However, that was not the case.

After completing the experiment, our group headed back to the classroom, where we started right away creating our boards for discussion. This is what our board looked like-

So, to answer the question of the experiment, yes time does affect a car's position. For every second our buggy traveled, the buggy traveled about 30 cm. 

The blue is our first part of the experiment. The green is the "juiced up" part if the experiment, where we moved our starting point with the car up 50 cm. We had our board discussion soon after. Many great points were brought up such as, "why isn't the y intercept 0 in the blue one if we started at 0?" Well, our group made a simple mistake with not putting in 0,0 in as a point for our equation. We are also not robots, so nothing can be measured perfectly.

Here are more points we talked about-

• y intercept is the starting point of the buggy

• distance, is not the same as position.

• cannot have negative distance

• faster speed = steeper slope. 

•linear graphs

 

Our board discussions are improving, however I still feel like more people should talk, and ask questions more! I feel like I could improve on asking more questions. 

In order to succeed in this lab, we definitely had to work well with our partners. I believe that my group did a great job together! We all had specific roles, and we used our time efficiently. I'm really looking forward to the next time we get to work with buggys again!!!!