Sunday, October 19, 2008

first quarter reflection


This past first quarter of physics has been FUN, but also confusing to me. I think the hardest part, for me, is the tests. When I take my tests, I forget certain concepts or I start to second guess myself. Some of the homework assignments have also been challenging because sometimes I can’t solve all of the problems. I’ll start off by writing down all of the givens and try plugging the numbers into equations, but I just get stuck. On some nights I’ll try to solve the same problems for about an hour, but still end up having to get help and finish it the next day. But aside from the tests and homework, the labs are something that I can more easily understand. I enjoy doing the labs and I think that by visually being able to see the concepts that we are learning, I’m able to understand better. This past quarter has been fun and I think that physics is really interesting, but at the same time has been more challenging for me than all of my previous science classes. My goals for this course are to better prepare myself for quizzes and tests. I also hope to come in for help more as soon as I need it and to practice on some of the other problems in our text. But up until this point, even though I’ve been trying hard, physics has been one of my harder classes and I’ve been pretty confused, like Simba.

Monday, October 6, 2008

projectile motion




This weekend I went to Waimea Bay and suddenly saw physics!! In this picture, a man is jumping off of the BIG rock in the bay, displaying a beautiful projectile motion. Our book defines projectile motions as movements determined by an object’s initial velocity and the constant acceleration of gravity. This motion can be broken up into two vectors, horizontal and vertical. In this case, the man doing the jumping is the projectile and the only force acting on him is gravity. The man starts his leap by jumping off the rock horizontally. His horizontal velocity isn’t affected by gravity and remains constant throughout his jump, but gravity does affect his vertical motion which accelerates him towards the water. As he moves through the air, this vertical (y) velocity becomes increasingly negative (he is accelerating at 9.8m/s2 in the negative direction) until he hits the water below. Projectile motions…very fun :D