Hot Wheels Physics

Name______Period ______Hot Wheels Physics!! Purpose: You will use 3 wooden blocks, a photogate, a stopwatch, a Hot Wheel car, and a track to determine the acceleration of your car. Procedure: 1. Set up the Hot Wheel track with one block of wood under the start. 2. Place the photogate exactly 1 meter down the track from where you will start your car. 3. Turn the photogate on by pressing the START button. Make sure your units show m/s!!! 4. Get a stopwatch 5. Have one person start the car while the other person starts the stop watch at the same time. 6. Have the timer stop the stop watch as the car goes through the photogate. 7. Record your time and speed from the photogate on the chart and calculate the acceleration for each trial as well as your average accelerations. 8. Do 5 trials!! 9. Repeat steps 1-8 using 2 wooden blocks. 10. Repeat steps 1-8 using 3 wooden blocks. Car Photogate

Wooden block 1 meter

# Blocks Trial # Time (sec) Vi (m/s) Vf (m/s) Acceleration (m/s2) 1 0 2 0 3 0 1 4 0 5 0 AVERAGE

1 0 2 0 3 0 2 4 0 5 0 AVERAGE

1 0 2 0 3 0 3 4 0 5 0 AVERAGE Lab Questions 1. Show your work for how you calculated one of your acceleration calculations below:

2. Show your work for how you calculated one of your average accelerations below: 3. What is acceleration?

4. Does the car accelerate down the ramp? EXPLAIN how you know.

5. What happens to the acceleration at you added more blocks? Give specific data!!

6. In general, as the car travels down the ramp further and further, what happens to its velocity?

7. For this lab, you calculated the average acceleration over 1 meter. If we wanted to know how the acceleration of the car changes over that 1 meter, what could we do differently in this experiment? (assuming we had enough supplies)