Velocity and Acceleration

Equipment

The Glider, picket fence and photo gate should be in the blue cabinet/drawer below the table.

Set up

Plug the photogate into the appropriate port on the Pasco Interface and that the hose from the air supply is connected to the Air Track properly.

Level the track.  Turn on the air track to somewhere between 3 and 4 and then adjust the airtrack so that it is level. You can do so by turning the knobs marked by green 1, we will level the air track until the glider doesn’t move either direction on its own.

It is occasionally necessary to put some small spacer, like a piece of cardboard or a coin under the foot marked by green 2 if you cannot get the track to balance just using the knobs.

Pasco Capstone Software Set up. Turn on the Pasco 850 Universal Interface (green light indicates it is on). Launch the Pasco Capstone Program. After clicking Hardware setup on the far left side we should see something similar to the below image.

Port setup. We select the port we plugged the photogate into and select picket fence.

Flag Spacing. Click the blue gear that is marked in the image below with a green circle and make sure that flag spacing (the green oval) is set properly equal to 5 cm. Note: the default flag spacing is 5 cm

 

Graphing Data.  Open a graph by dragging it from the tools on the far right side. We then select the “select measurement” button on the graph and chose what data we want displayed. They are highlighted with red ovals in the image below.

Experiment and Results

Data Collection, measurements, and recording. Hit record in the bottom left of the screen, run the experiment, hit stop (same place as record) and our data should show on our graph.

Analyze graph. Click the icon identified by the red circle in the image below (a Σ symbol)  and set a linear fit line which should also display the equation for the line

How to incline the track. To get our different heights for part 1 of this experiment use the 4 cylindrical weights, shown below, to get 5 incremental heights.

Varying the mass of glider. Place two cylinders on each side of the glider. If you need an additional prop for the incline – use the large 500g weight from the top drawer of the blue cabinet.