Week 3 Blog Post

 Olivia Langosch

The big question addressing in lab was what affects a rider's speed down a slide? The variable that our group tested was height/slope. We did the height of each person in our group because we thought it would be fun if we did this in our future classes for the students to measure each other. The picture below is our final calculations. We noticed that the taller each person is, or the taller the slide, the faster you go down the slide. 

In Thursday's lecture, I learned about each variable we tested in class, looking at other people's findings, and each variable. I really thought that a larger weight would make a rider go faster, but when talking about everyone's findings, we found out that weight really does not affect the rider's speed at all, which was shocking to me. 

In the textbook reading, I learned a lot more about friction. I was always confused about this when I was growing up in school, and the textbook gave a good definition of "a force that holds back the motion of a sliding object or resistance to motion of one object moving relative to another." Also, talking about this in lecture, and giving examples was very helpful to me understanding this topic. This was also more helpful to me because as I said, I was always confused on this, and the explanations in this book really helped me understand the whole idea of friction. I do not have any questions, but practicing examples with all of Newton's Laws that were talked about in the book will help me understand all of these ideas more because I am more of a visual learner, and practicing these in real life scenarios will help me get a better overall understanding.