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 :)