Today we want to take what we have learned about motion, in particular the concept of position, speed, velocity and average velocity, and translate it into actual motion of a moving body. In particular, we want to experience how speed is the slope of the position vs. time graph, and how acceleration is the slope of the velocity vs. time graph.
We are going to use a simulation of a "Moving Man" to explore the relationship between displacement, velocity, and acceleration. We will do some statistical analysis on some motion data, and we will see if you can make the Moving Man reproduce a graph of motion.
We will be using the Moving Man PhET simulation. PhET stands for Physics Education Technology, and this is the first in a series of simulations you will use for phyiscs 105 and 106 lab. You can access the PhET site by searching for "phet" in any search engine (e.g. Google), or go there directly at http://phet.colorado.edu. Once at the site, click on "physics", then "motion", then scroll down to "Moving Man", or simply search the site for "Moving Man." You can download it or just click on it to play. Further instruction are given in the lab procedure.
We will use today's data to take what we have learned about taking and analyzing data, and put it all together so that we can understand how and why we present experimental results along with their related errors. We will deal with three things in error analysis: combining experimental errors when we need to combine two measurements in a mathematical formula, how we are able to get a measure of the experimental error from Excel for a straight line fit, and how to use our measurements along with the error in order to compare two values together.
Please be sure to read the appropriate sections on 1D motion in your text, and read the lab.