1. Our experiment was fairly simple, we decided to use an Iphone, paperclip, and ruler to determine the rate of acceleration in the classroom. Our experiment's goal was: Drop a paper clip from a certain height (~25 cm) off of a ruler and measure the time it takes for the clip to travel down length of the ruler.
2. Something we considered was how to get an accurate record of time when we dropped the paperclip. This then led up to decide that we needed to use the slo-mo feature on an iphone video recorder to get an exact measure of how many seconds the process took. During the video we set up another phone next to the ruler so we could visually see exact milliseconds that were the beginning and end of the paperclip falling. (shown to the left) 3. Our procedure is pretty much the same as stated above and the formula that we used to solve for acceleration was the formula used for the change in displacement. (shown above) In this equation, the change in displacement is equal to the initial velocity, multiplied by the change in time, plus 1/2 times the acceleration, multiplied by the change in time squared.
4. After 10 very long runs data from the experiment, we got a total average of 9.24 m/s2 as our rate of acceleration, this is very close to the true value which is 9.8. Our standard deviation was 2.235., and our total percent of error had a value of 5.71%. |