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A Publication for Users of Vernier Products
Volume 14, Number 1 Fall 1997
The Drop Zone
Trips to the amusement park have become very popular for physics classes. CBL™ has helped make this happen. My favorite ride, from a physics point of view, is the Drop Zone at Great America in Santa Clara, CA. The ride is a free fall of 39.3 m (129 ft), and then during the final 23.8 m of descent, Lenz's law eddy currents are used to slow the chairs to a stop. There are powerful permanent magnets built into the chairs and aluminum fins near where the chairs move. Here is a graph of the vertical acceleration on the ride. One interesting thing is that before the fall, the ride gives the rider two fake releases. Note that these also show up on the graph. Thanks to Clarence Bakken, Gunn HS, Palo Alto, CA for providing this data.
Using Two Photogates with the CBL
When we developed the new, low-cost Vernier Photogate (VPG-DG), we made one mistake: it did not work properly when used with a CBL and a two-photogate adapter (CBL-2P). We have revised the CBL-2P adapter so that it now works with the new photogate. If you received CBL-2P adapters before this summer and if you use our new photogates, we will revise your adapters so they work properly at no charge.There is a excellent introduction to Interactive Lecture Demonstrations using MBL by David R. Sokoloff and Ron Thornton in the September 1997 issue of The Physics Teacher. We are now distributing David and Ron's Mechanics Interactive Lecture Demonstrations package. Macintosh and IBM versions are available (ILD-MAC or ILD-IBM, $18).
The September 1996 issue of The Physics Teacher had several articles discussing our products:
If you have ever wondered about the polarization of helium-neon lasers and how it changes, check out the article by Edwin R. Jones (University of South Carolina). He had his students do an elaborate study of the polarization using our ULI. The polarization changes in interesting ways that students would not expect.
There also was a note on measuring temperature coefficients of resistors by Paul D. Schulze (Abilene Christian University).
Recently, Analog Devices asked us to write an article on our use of accelerometers in their newsletter for engineers. The article gives a brief summary of how we have introduced accelerometers into teaching and includes a lot of sample graphs. Let us know if you would like a copy.
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