Innovative Uses

New Way to Do Egg-Drop Contests!
Danielle Spaete (Pleasant Valley HS, IA) came up with a great new way to do egg-drop contests using our Force Plate. Students are given a 5-gallon bucket to be placed on a Force Plate. They then drop a basketball from a height of 1.5 meters into the bucket. After observing the forces applied by the basketball, students are challenged to build an “air bag” out of newspaper to help cushion the fall. In a traditional egg-drop experiment, there isn’t any measurement; the egg either breaks or it doesn’t, and you only get one chance. With Danielle’s method, students get quanitative results, and they can do the experiment over and over again. As an added bonus, the cleanup is a cinch!

Hurricane Charley
Curt Witthoff, Secondary Math/Science Specialist for Collier County Public Schools in Naples, FL, recorded these data as Hurricane Charley pounded the coastline near his house. He used Vernier sensors with a LabPro and TI graphing calculator. The equipment was placed in a box with the sensors exposed, and left on his patio. The times on the x-axis correspond to the 24-hour clock on August 13, 2004. The pressure data tells us that the eye of the hurricane passed closest to Naples around 3 p.m. The temperature decreased as the storm approached and continued to drop until 6 p.m. Relative humidity changed inversely with temperature, as expected. The relative humidity readings exceeding 100% were most likely caused by condensation on the electronics. When the temperature increased and the condensation evaporated, the readings came back into range. Light levels dropped as Charley approached and stayed fairly dark until the sun set around 8 p.m. Thanks for the interesting data, Curt. We are very glad you and your equipment survived the storm!

A Very Unusual Use of LabPro
Probably one of the most unusual uses of our products we have heard of appeared in the August 2004 issue of Outdoor Life, a magazine about hunting and fishing. They used our Sound Level Meter and our 25-g Accelerometer to do a comparative study of hunting bows.

Summer AAPT Experiments
At our workshop at the Summer AAPT meeting, teachers did some of the following experiments. You may want to try some of these with your classes.

• Use two Vernier Photogates to measure the velocity of a golf swing. To make a wider gate, shine a laser pointer into the outer sensor of the Photogate.
• Sew a 3-Axis Accelerometer to the back of a bike glove to analyze a badminton serve. Use Logger Pro 3.3’s new animated meters to show real-time vector motion.
• Mount a Dual-Range Force Sensor, TI graphing calculator, and LabPro onto a bicycle wheel to investigate centripetal force. A Magnetic Field Sensor and a magnet can be used to measure the angular velocity of the wheel.
• Wrap a dowel rod in aluminum foil to use as a battery replacement slug for a toy car. Analyze the reduction in the car’s velocity when using the slug in place of one battery.
• Use the video-analysis feature of Logger Pro 3.3 to investigate the flight path of a ping-pong ball launched from a catapult made from spare Lego™ parts. A ping-pong ball is light enough to exhibit measurable air resistance.
• Remove the hook from a Dual-Range Force Sensor, and attach a small, wooden platform for measuring the lift off force of a toy popper.
• Support a 2 m board between two Force Plates to determine a student’s center of mass. You can animate the motion of the center of mass using the new animated display feature. Try standing, sitting, and laying down with arms and legs extended into the air.

See www.vernier.com/physics for complete instructions, as well as sample data for these labs.

Hospital Sound Levels
William Church’s students at Littleton High School, Littleton, NH, used our Sound Level Meter and LabPro as tools to help them reduce levels of sound transmitted between cubicles in hospital offices. They experimented with sound damping and masking the sound with background music and came up with a solution that improved the situation. Here is one of their graphs of the change in sound level with additional sound damping.