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Acceleration of Gravity  

I've already done two big investigations, so this will be a smaller followup. I'm going to have students do a version of Gallileo's experiment where he looked at the acceleration of gravity by rolling a ball down an inclined plane. They will roll two types of balls varying distances down a plane at varying angles. They'll do several trials of each and average them. This will result in a lot of data that would be a huge pain to graph by hand, so we'll put it all in Excel so we can look at a variety of things like angle vs. time, distance vs. time, distance vs. time squared etc. Hopefully, using the graphs and perhaps Excel's trendline feature, we should be able to get a rough approximation of the acceleration of gravity as well as an appreciation that distance = 1/2 a t squared. We'll see.

587:1988

edittextuser=1374 post_id=1988 initial_post_id=0 thread_id=587

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