MYP Year 10 Physics P Bonifacio paolospe76@gmail.

com

Worksheet Investigation Constant acceleration motion

- You will investigate:

1. uniformly accelerated motion by taking data with the

“The Moving Man” PhET simulation
2. how the data can be organized into a Space-Time diagram
3. the time law for uniformly accelerated motion

Read carefully the following instruction and complete the worksheet in detail.

Background knowledge: acceleration and velocity law

For an object moving along a straight direction the acceleration is defined as:

In symbols

Where the symbol (read delta) means “change in”.

The units of the acceleration are found from the equation above:

[ ] ( )

 Mathematically you can find the velocity of the motion at any time using the formula

Constant acceleration motion

 Where:
= velocity (vertical axis)
= time (horizontal axis)
= acceleration (it is the slope or gradient of the line)
= initial velocity, i.e. the velocity at time

The above formula will give a straight line in a velocity Vs Time graph.

But what about the position of the uniformly accelerated object and its Space-Time
diagram? This worksheet will let you investigate this.

Instructions
Part a.

- Open “The Moving Man” software

- Set an acceleration of
- Remove the walls by clicking on the red crosses
- Run the animation for 20 seconds so that the data are recorded by the
software
- Now press on playback so that you can see the animation as slowly as you
want
- Click on the box velocity vector and playback the animation. While you do
that notice how the red arrow representing the velocity gets longer and
longer as the velocity increases
- Now you are ready to record your data into an Excel spreadsheet :
Create a table with three columns where you will record the values of time,
position and velocity every 1 second
Remember to indicate the units, your table will look something like this
(make sure you include time t = 0 as well):
t (s) x (m) v (m/s)
0 0 0
0.5 0.06 0.25
1 0.25 0.50
Your table will continue up to t = 20 seconds
- Now use Excel to plot a Velocity VS Time graph:
Velocity v will go on the vertical axis
Time t will go on the horizontal axis
- Do the data align along a straight line as they should?
- Use Excel to display a best fit straight line (trend line, linear fit)

- Use Excel to display the equation on chart and the R-squared

value:
- Is the fit good?
- What is the slope of the line?
- Does this slope agree with what you expected? Why?
- Now use Excel to plot a Space-Time graph (Position Vs Time):

Position x will go on the vertical axis

Time t will go on the horizontal axis

- Do the data align along a straight line?

- Try to add a linear fit trend line. What is the value of the R-squared?
Is this value indicating that the linear fit is good or bad?
- With Excel try to add now a different kind of fit: click on trendline,
more trendline options and select polynomial fit (order 2)

o Polynomial fit of order 2 means that Excel will try to fit your data
with a curve of equation like:
 Remembering your maths, which kind of curve is this?

Of course for you the symbols should be more like

Since you have time in the horizontal axis and position in the
vertical axis.
o What is the value of the R-squared now?
o What does this indicate about the quality of the fit?
o Use Excel to display the equation of the curve on the chart. Re-Write
it here using the right symbols [remember excel calls x and y the
horizontal and vertical axis, while for you they are called t and x]
o Can you see any number in your equation that is closely related to
the acceleration of the motion? (remember this was set to
)

Part b.
In this part of your investigation you will study Space-Time graphs for uniformly
accelerated motions and you will try to understand how the graphs can be
connected to the properties of the motion, i.e. acceleration, initial position and
velocity. Your final goal will be to discover the time law for the uniformly
accelerated motion

- You will now re-run the simulation from scratch 4 more times. For each
simulation you will choose the initial parameters (i.e. acceleration, initial
velocity and initial position) as shown in the table below

Simulation Number ( )
Initial velocity Initial position

1 1 0 0
2 2 0 0
3 -0.5 -1 10
4 1 1 -8
 The initial velocity and position are the velocity and position that the
man has at time and can be set by adjusting the controls in the
corresponding color before the simulations are run.

- For each of the 4 simulations record the data for position, velocity and time
from t = 0 up to t = 20 seconds. Record the data every 1 second. Build and
show the corresponding data table for each simulation as done in part A.
- For each data table use Excel to plot the corresponding Space-Time
diagram
- For each diagram use Excel to show a polynomial order 2 fit to the data. In
your diagram show the equation on chart and the corresponding R-squared.
Are the fits good?
- Complete now the table below, by pasting the equations found by Excel in
the last column (remember to change y into x and x into t):
Simulation ( ) Polynomial fit equation
Number Initial velocity Initial position

1 1 0 0

2 2 1 0

3 -0.5 -1 10

4 1 2 -8

- Do you now see any clear link between the coefficients of your equations
and the values of the acceleration, initial velocity and initial position?
- Are you now able to complete the table below?
Constant Velocity Motion Constant Acceleration Motion

Time Law ……?…..

Velocity Law

Remember: indicates the initial position and indicates the initial

velocity