Blog #3 Winter Break Adventure!

Since this blog was about a winter activity, the first thing that came to my mind was sledding. Sledding is always fun whether you are by yourself or with a group of friends, and it is a very common activity people do in the winter. So, for my blog, I decided I would calculate my little brother's speed while sledding down the hill in our backyard.

In order to calculate the speed of my little brother on his sled, I first had to put two rulers in the snow for the distance traveled that I was going to calculate. I placed the two rulers 191 inches apart (5 feet, 11 inches) and moved on to the next step. The next step was to get my little brother ready to sled down our hill. I made sure he lined up so he wouldn't hit the rulers when he sled down the hill, and then he stood against the side of our house so he could get a running start. Then I stood as far back as I needed to and I recorded him going down our hill. After we finished sledding, I went inside to do the technology part of this project.

To find the velocity and acceleration of my little brother and his sled, I needed to plug the video into LoggerPro. Once I put the video in LoggerPro, I highlighted the length of the hill I wanted to calculate and plugged it in as 191 inches. Then I had to plot every point the sled moved in order to make the graphs. After I finished plotting the points, I got graphs of X (in), Y (in), X Velocity (in/s) and Y Velocity (in/s).

By finding the slope of both the X and Y position vs. time graphs, I then knew the velocity. The velocity in the X direction was -112.4 in/s since my little brother was sledding down the hill to the left. The velocity in the Y direction was -17.99 in/s. I then used the slope of the X Velocity and the Y Velocity graphs to find the acceleration in the X and Y directions. Since the sled was going to the left, the deceleration of the sled in the x direction was -14.58 in/s/s. The deceleration of the sled in the Y direction was -3.813 in/s/s.

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