Day: 13

This quarter, we learned a lot about Newton's laws and free body diagrams. Newton's laws are as follows:


Newtons Law #1: Every object continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless compelled to change that state by external forces acted upon it.
Newtons Law #2: The acceleration a of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the netforce F acting on the body, is in the direction of the net force, and is inversely proportional to the mass m of the body, i.e., F = ma. (also known as F, ma)
Newtons Law #3: When two bodies interact by exerting force on each other, these action andreaction forces are equal in magnitude, but opposite in direction.

We learned a lot about projectile motion and a ridiculous amount on forces!! As we learned about each of Newton's laws, we had to apply them to real-life scenarios as well as learn about what would "theoretically" happen (for example), without friction! We also learned about pulleys and free body diagrams! Forces was a little harder because there are so many different types of force but we also learned to do pulleys and drawing free body diagrams and even learned to solve and draw pulleys on slopes! Which got really complicated. But here is a picture of a fig newton since we seemed to talk about Newtons a lot this quarter :) 

Day: 12

Today, although mostly review, was actually pretty stressful/hard. This was because our lab, the air track lab, did not work out well. However, we soon decided to do one lab as a class which made things much clearer and easier to understand. Also, when everything was explained, it really helped and solving for acceleration and such became much simpler. Today, we went into more depth/reviewed "F=ma" or more complicated versions such as W-T=ma. Although this is basically the same formula (very similar) to "F=ma", it was very hard for me to understand clearly at first. After lots of practice on the board I began to understand and soon were easily solving problems with pulleys and things that were hard for me at first! I hope I continue to be able to grasp these concepts and am definitely up for more practice in our "fatteh packets"....

PS I sure wish I had a tree house pulley like these kids! 

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=pulley+to+tree+house&um=1&hl=en&client=safari&sa=N&rls=en&biw=1024&bih=645&tbm=isch&tbnid=mWghTPF0OyVzdM:&imgrefurl=http://www.junecleavernirvana.com/tree-house/&docid=icga9Zup3m_X-M&imgurl=http://www.junecleavernirvana.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/treehousethreeboysandabucket.jpg&w=600&h=350&ei=36_rT4nuC4qsrQHftLjkBQ&zoom=1

Day: 11

Today, we learned something that was pretty different from anything we have learned yet! They are drawing diagrams called free body diagrams. This means that we write/draw the object and situation and the forces are drawn on. This was pretty easy to understand after a while, because it is just as you would imagine, though the directions are hard to understand. We learned about the different types of forces, normal, tension, applied, weight (gravity), and sometimes, acceleration. We also learned that we had to make the arrows longer if the force is greater. This, of course, made things a bit more complicated but after lots of packets and practice, got easier. This applies to every day activities, such as just sitting down! When one is laying down and sleeping (like Sammy the dog), there are two forces, that of weight (gravity) pulling down, and the normal force pulling you up so that you do not fall through to the earth's core!! 

Day: 10

Today we learned that an object at rest will tend to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside unbalanced force.

Today we proved this through a pen and paper. We stood up a pen on a sheet of paper and if we pulled the paper from beneath the pen quick enough, the pen would stay still. This was somewhat hard to achieve at first but once we got the hang of it, it was pretty cool. We also learned about why it sometimes fell, and this is due to friction. That must be how the "magic" tricks worked with the tablecloth and plates. (when the magician rips the tablecloth from beneath the set table and nothing breaks or falls, it stays in the sam position, just without the tablecloth!) We also learned about Newtons laws (which is what the pen trick revolved around) and I have them written down to remember!

Newtons Law #1: Every object continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless compelled to change that state by external forces acted upon it.

Newtons Law #2: The acceleration a of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the netforce F acting on the body, is in the direction of the net force, and is inversely proportional to the mass m of the body, i.e., F = ma. (also known as F, ma)

Newtons Law #3: When two bodies interact by exerting force on each other, these action andreaction forces are equal in magnitude, but opposite in direction.

I have to make sure I know and understand them! And that pen trick definitely helped in the process...

Day: 9

Today was pretty challenging! There was a few things from Day 8 (the graphs) that were hard for me to understand, but today was a great day of clearing those questions up. At first, it was hard for me to set myself up with the mindset that (for example) when a ball is tossed, there are actually two motions that are happening at the same time rather than one. Yet still, it was even harder for me to understand that one of those motions were the fact that the ball moves at a constant velocity horizontally (x-axis) and that it moves with the pattern of fast, slow, stop, slow fast, vertically (y-axis) and furthermore that these must never be thought of as conjoined because the axes are independent. However, after I was able to make myself comfortable with this mindset, I feel as though I was able to clearly understand the graphs and the word problems.

Day: 8

Today, we continued our learning on motion but this time, we added motion going in two directions when earlier, we were only dealing with one. This made things a little trickier but after some practice, we got the hang of it. Something that was pretty surprising and interesting to me was the simple demonstration with the pens. Two pens were held above the ground at the same distance but one of the pens were tossed straight forward (no arc so the height didn't go any higher) while the other was dropped. Before this was demonstrated, we were asked what we thought would happen and many of us predicted that the one being tossed forward would land after (meaning that the one dropped would land first). We soon learned that in fact we were wrong and that both pens landed at the same time. This is because both axes are independent so the time doesn't differ between the two. This reminded me of a jump that my friends and I did off of some rocks and that of course when we jump, we are going a little higher but if one of us stepped off and the other (somehow) jumped only forward/horizontally, then both people would land at the same time!

Day: 7

Physics, in many ways, can be pretty challenging but all in all a pretty fun subject. Over the past two weeks, we learned a lot of different things about motion and different ways to see and interpret it. Each day of physics has really been a day full of learning. I really enjoy our physics class because as we do sometimes get "lectured", we also do many visual and hands-on activities which really help me to make the information stick in my brain! On the first day, we learned about motion through a pendulum. This was a pretty great way to start since from the very small amount of physics that I did know about before the class, was the fact that pendulums were a big part of physics so I was interested to finally learn about it. We also learned about what and how different variables affected pendulum length differently and throughout this process, we were able to learn about relationships and about the different graphs and shapes of the graphs. The second day was a bit more challenging but very fun nonetheless. We learned about a bit more detailed stuff and I learned a new vocabulary word that day, "kinematics"! We learned about a very common motion, that of walking, running, hopping, and I also connected these motions with that of a car. All of these motions are very involved with our every day lives and I found it amazing that I really hadn't learned much about it until this summer and was very surprised and eager to learn all about it. We also had learned about slopes and more about graphing motion. On the third day, as we continued to learn about motion, we mainly focused on motion through velocity versus time graphs. This took me a while to understand but once it clicked, all of the puzzle pieces fell into place and I really felt as though I understood it well. I related this to a beating heart and I think that this helped me to understand it very clearly because of my future interest of going into the medical field and becoming a doctor. We also learned about how to translate our graphs between position versus time and velocity versus time. After some practice, I think everyone really got the hang of it. On the fourth day, we learned a lot about acceleration. I felt as though this really brought the lessons of motion together and that I really understand how and why things are moving. This was the day that we used the skateboard to understand it and this was a very fun and entertaining activity that really got people's minds reeling as they were involved in the fun. On the fifth day, we learned a lot about gravity which, of course, is super important since we live on planet earth where gravity is upon us for every second of every day! We were able to learn about how it affected each and every object and even how it affected us as humans and pressed upon us all the time but we just don't feel it like that since we are so used to it! I thought that this lesson was super interesting and really enjoyed it. Today, we brought everything in together and basically tied it up with a bow. We reviewed a lot and learned some more and clarified a lot about acceleration vs time graphs (especially for me) since those were pretty challenging but I think I finally got the hang of it. We also had a lab practical where we tested our knowledge on free fall which we also learned a lot about. Free fall has a lot to do with gravity and acceleration and applies a lot of the equations which seems pretty challenging but I think after all of the labs and different ways that we learned about it, everyone hopefully did fairly well! My fingers are crossed :)

Day: 6

Today, we learned a lot about acceleration and in this process, we were also able to learn a lot about gravity! We also learned that when a ball is thrown up, and when it is moving in an upward motion, it still has gravity pushing down it which means that it also has a downward acceleration and this was pretty surprising to me! I always thought that acceleration was always in the same motion as the object was moving but today I was proved wrong and I found that really interesting. When I got home, I decided to go in the pool and I was throwing a water polo ball around and realized that this was just what we learned about in physics! The picture above is of my water polo ball landing in the water and from what I learned today, the reason that the water is splashing is because the ball is coming down with force and that force is there because of gravity, and the gravity is the reason that at almost all times, there is a downward acceleration on everything on earth no matter the actual direction of motion of the object. I thought today's lesson, although challenging, was pretty fun!

Extra Credit!

Last night I showed my parents my blog and told them all about what we have been doing in class and even stuff about the labs and even showed them some of my worksheets and asked them if they knew the material I was learning. They said that they do not remember much but they became reminiscent about high school and started telling me stories about when they were my age. I really enjoyed talking to them about my physics work since I feel as though I am doing well with it and thereby naturally, I have been enjoying it. When I showed them my work, they were most interested in my blog because of the pictures and they loved the idea of me reflecting and writing about the stuff that I have learned about for each day and even making conclusions and connections with different aspects of my life and they thought it was a great way to learn and to "solidify my learning". Here are some pictures of them looking at my blog :) (see how excited my mom is!)

Day: 5

Today, we did a lab that at first, I was unsure where it was heading but soon understood easily. I believe that the relationship between just "skate-boarding" (or platform-boarding in our case) and our continuation of learning about kinematics and more specifically about acceleration really brought it all together. During the lab I took a picture of Tom riding the platform-board. It was during one of the many initial attempts and when I took the picture I believe he was not accelerating much at that moment nor had much speed to begin with. Also, although I normally am not very good at math and especially at algebra, with the new equations that we were taught today, were something that I surprisingly understood very well! I also really liked the idea that for this class, we should try to switch our midgets of trying to smash a million problems on one page to using as much room as we need and to organize our thoughts. I believe that this alone made the process much easier as I felt free to write as much as I needed to my thoughts were thoroughly organized and written as I made my way through the problem.

Day: 4

Today we learned a lot about graphs while we continued to learn about kinematics/motion. We also were able to learn much about how we are able to change position and time graphs to velocity and time graphs and vice versa. An example that I have thought of is a heart beat...as the graphs continue to remind me of a monitored heart. That is why I decided to use a picture of a heart (although of course not a real one, its actually a heart shaped rice krispy ;) As the graph of a monitored heart moves up and down and looks pretty exaggerated, this easily relates to the motion sensors and how we walked at different rates, directions, and distances and specifically, the velocity and time graphs. Each time a heart beats, it pumps blood and moves up and down and it generally looks like the heart is moving up and down, and each time it does so, the graph shoots upward when the heart pumps up, and downward when the heart goes back down. I also can see how when a heart is beating hard, the graph's slope is much higher and reaches much higher as well as lower whereas when the heart is beating softly, it is a smaller slope and does not go as high or as low. These graphs were very interesting to me as they have related to something that our bodies do every day and constantly while we are alive. 

PS sorry for the late post! My computer kept acting up and wouldn't let me post anything.

Day: 3

Today we learned a lot about motion and kinematics! Specifically, we learned a lot about graphing motion which was pretty intriguing and brought up many interesting concepts that I think everyone was surprised with and new in learning! I also thought that the physics olympics lab was really entertaining because through it, we were able to see how such a simple every day motion (running, walking, hopping) can present so many new concepts to learn and how something so small actually creates a huge opportunity to work with! I chose to use this picture because again, it is something that we see everyday and is basically a part of everyone's every day lives. We drive in cars, see cars, ride in cars, and I have never really thought about how it's motion affects our lives as I believe that is also true for many others. Now, when I look at a car, I think about graphs with a positive slope but sometimes even a negative slope! (backing up, although times with negative slope in a car are much less than that of a positive slope since cars don't drive backwards too often) I can also imagine the graph to be pretty bumpy (not really showing a straight line) because I am sure that cars do not go at a perfect constant rate at all times, they slow down, stop, and speed up. I really enjoyed todays lesson and am interested in learning more!

Day: 2

This is a picture of a tire swing near my house and I decided to take a picture of it while I was walking my dog because it reminded me of a pendulum! Although this tire swing looks a lot like a pendulum, I see that there is one key thing that probably makes it very different although I'm not positive! This is the fact that this tire swing, as compared to the pendulums we worked with in class, has three "strings" as the pendulums had one. I am not sure if this would affect the length of period as we tested in class but it is something that would be interesting to experiment. Also, before we tested each of the variables for the lab, we each had to make a hypothesis on what we thought the results would be. When I did this, I thought that the relationship between mass and period length would be directly proportional and was pretty confident about it. I soon learned that this was an incorrect hypothesis and that in reality, mass and period length have no relationship which was a pretty big surprise to me. Now I know that no matter the mass of the person sitting on the tire swing, the period should theoretically stay the same!

Introduction Day: 1

I'm Ashlee Grover and I'm 15 years old. I live in Hawaii and am going into junior year at Punahou. I first came to Punahou as a 6th grader. For science so far I've taken biology and chemistry honors. Biology was very interesting to me and came easily as I am interested in going into the medical field, but chemistry was a whole different story. Chemistry made absolutely no sense to me and I did pretty poorly, I'm hoping that physics does not turn out like chemistry did! I took algebra II and am going into pre-calculus next year. As a result of completing this course, I hope to obtain a better understanding of physics (as at this point I don't know much) but hope to learn more and I seem to like it so far! I chose this picture because sunset is my favorite time of day because it's always so pretty and never gets old or boring to watch. I'm also definitely a "night person" rather than a "morning person" so sunset is like the beginning of the favorite part of my day (: