Learning physics anew
Learning Physics the non-traditional way at a Liberal-Arts college, with three students attending the class, is fun. This is my experience of learning a discipline and trying to negotiate with it in a space where not all traditional learning tools might be at hand.
Physics Lab: August 25th, 2022
We were learning about 2D motion in projectiles, and we came across the question of how to project an object in space and study its motion in order to confirm the theory we learned in class. Building a projectile launcher in itself was a challenge (we don't have access to a formal lab with all experimental equipment), but our professor managed to build one with the material at hand and brought it to class.
The design and idea were great (given the restraint in time and material), and we quickly got to test its workings with a rubber ball. However, once we got around to playing with the launcher, we were presented with its drawbacks.
Drawbacks of the machine:
- The spring kept getting stuck inside the pipe or kept popping out of the pipe.
- The string meant for pulling on the spring was not frictionless and would also get stuck.
- The cap meant to catch the ball, attached at the top of the spring, was not frictionless.
- The machine could not launch the heavy rubber ball with ease.
Despite these, we conducted the experiment with the help of a paper ball, timing the ball’s motion with an iPhone timer and manually marking the points on which the ball landed.
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This crude experimentation of the projectile motion of the ball gave us varied and error-laden results.
Furthermore, we calculated the error for each of the observations and christened the launcher as ‘Launcher the TERRIBLE.’ The reason for this name is evident in the data below.
To find out which of the factors had a significant contribution to the error percentage, we conducted a sensitivity analysis using partial differentiation.
Through this analysis, we concluded that it was the measurement of the angle and the time which had the most impact on the final results and hence need to be corrected and carefully measured for upcoming experiments.
This concluded the preliminary experiment that we conducted with our simple projectile launcher.
