Week 9 Reflection

This week in physics was a little mixed up because we didn't have school Tuesday for Election Day and we ended up taking our assessment from the previous week on Wednesday. However, we reviewed unbalanced forces, which the quiz consisted of, and also began exploring paired forces. Because our class was a bit confused overall on the unbalanced force standards, we spent all of Thursday after the quiz Wednesday whiteboarding and going over the correct processes. We reviewed how an object moves in the direction of the unbalanced force and how component forces create resultant forces. We continued to review force diagrams and how to create them from written situations.

I ended up doing really well on the assessment, but I am going to reassess a standard next week because I now understand it much better than before. I forgot the fact that on a ramp, because it is slanted, exerts a force on an angle, not straight up. The force is perpendicular to the ramp, so therefore the force either has to be at a northeast angle or northwest angle depending upon the direction of the ramp. The funny part is that throughout the test another similar question came up, but I completed that one correctly with the ramp angled on my force diagram. So I actually do have a good understanding of the concept, but I'm going to reassess to show my complete understanding this week.

On Friday we began discovering paired forces and used two force panels to introduce the idea. Emily and Donovan pushed the two force panels together, but even when one person exerted more force than the other, the forces on both the panels remained equal. The class then explored further with connected spring scales using mulitple experiments. It was concluded that the spring scales always exerted the same force on one another, but there were two different directions- positive and negative. The graph then looked the same, but was reflected over the x-axis. As we moved at a constant speed, the scales only bobbed up and down a little bit, but at an unconstant speed, they bopped much more frequently and at greater distances.

Until next week,
#TmPhys12