Review of the year

TO review this year will take more than i can possibly write, we have learned and been through too much to just write a blog about it. Through out this year, there were many concepts we learned, and many skills we obtained to not only become physics experts but a better student in all aspects. Theres no real way to explain the skills we learned, but i will admit that at first, i really didnt understand the skills Mr. Abud was trying to teach us, but now that its been a full 180 days of his class, and ive reached the end, i now really appreciate the skills i have taken away from his class, and i hope my class mates did too. Ive changed some aspects of my work habits (its really hard to change anything about me, so i give Mr. Abud some props. Ive become more interested in the lessons i can learn, rather than the grade i get. I can learn a lot from all my classes, but they keep us worried about our "grade", not the knowledge we take home after the class, which now leads me to get a better grade, but I still don't know much about the subject. In this class, my "grade" never matter, I just paid attention every day, got involved, and learned a lot about physics. That's suppose to be the point of school anyways, right? Everything from way energy is transferred, to the gravitational pull of the moon, I felt confident about. Each and every day I would enter that class, although I may not seems super focused, I was learning something new. Being in here for 180 days, I have to say there isn't a single thing that I would change about how the class is run. Well, there is one thing. There should be a super big picture of a mantis shrimp on the board, that'd freak everybody out, and you would get a good kick out of it. Besides that, if that class continues to run they way it ran for me, these next coming generations of students will have a much different, better perspective of learning, and that's the biggest lesson I learned from this class, perspective. Thanks for a great year Mr.Abud, hopefully I will see you over the summer and you can explain to why it's (in physics terms) unsafe to drive with no doors on my jeep or something, have a great summer!

Week 22

This week my group and I have been working on our cardboard boat. We've started so far by a simple 8 foot box in which we have cut, taped, and shaped into a (hopefully) workable boat. We're trying to make it as big as possible, due to our fear of us just getting into the boat and sinking it if its too small. We have been using the skills we learned from the aluminum foil experiment that we conducted in class to find out how much surface area we needed for our weight. With 8 feet of boat, we have enough surface area. What I learned from the testes we did in class was that a certain amount of surface area carried only a certain amount of weight, so we were better better off with the larger boat than trying to risk making a smaller one. At this point, the boat is still in its less developed stage. It's ready to row, sure, but it has no form of decorations and no form of any hydrodynamic setup, so this week need we are going to have to work on it and really get it to where it is presentable. I believe Daniel and I are going to be the rowers, or it may Mary, but we will see. Something I learned for sure is it was kind of easy to find the water line on the boat. Judging by the surface area and the amount of weight being used on the boat (rowers), I can't imagine it to be too difficult to find out where to put the line of tape to judge the water line. Overall, building this boat has been a fun job and I'm excited for the races!

Week 24

This week, things got very complicated very fast. But no need to fear, Mr. Abud was there. We began learning about Energy, power and work. It was a pretty easy concept to grasp. They all use and need one another to perform their function, but what got me nervous and confused was memerizing and using the formulas to figure out the work and power of certain scenerios given to us. It was very easy for me to confuse the energy formula with the watts formula with the work formula and so on. After out experiment of us running up and down the stairs, it began to make more sense to me, but again, the formulas were still throwing me off. I regrettably didnt go to Mr. Abud for immediate help, as i was struggling with the concepts we learned. Fortunitly though, i managed to get a good nights sleep on Wednesday night and had a good cup of Caribeu Coffee in the morning and on Thursday, i really had a light bulb come on for me. I wont lie, i didnt suddenly become a genius with this stuff, but i think i did much better on the assesment than i would of if i didnt manage to understand the concepts the way i did the day before. The assesment was a little tricky,i was struggling with the last 4 problems due to me mixing up and mistakenly using the wrong formulas for some of the questions, which caused my table to yell at me for taking so long to finish my assesment so they can talk, but atleast i (think) figured it out in the end and hopefully my heavy attention-paying on Thursday paid off. I dont usually get hung up on the concepts in this class, but when it comes to multiple formulas that must be used correctly and with one another, i really was strained. Over all, i found this week very helpful. I learned alot about how energy, power, and work relate and how i can calculate the amount of horse power i have and other objects have during a given time. This information helps alot, and im glad i managed to understand and use it.

Week 23

This week we did the boat races and I must say it was pretty intense. I learned a lot about how the way we structured our boats reflected the way we perform. For instance, our boat was very long and wide so it had no tipping or sinking problems but we weren't as quick as some people with smaller boats but sunk soon after in most cases. I like the way the regada is setup so there isn't anything I would change. For the questions, here's the answers: 1: I believe the sinking of the boats that I saw had to due with weight distribution. As people were entering the boat, they will not equally distribute their weight, causing the already flimsy boat to cave in due to in balanced weights. The second factor for the sinking was surface area of the boat. Typically, the boats that sank had very little surface area so as eight was added, the boat was not able to push of the water to remain of about the water line, causing it to sink in. The third factor was the material. Although we all used cardboard, some people decided to use thinner cardboard with more cuts and pieces than some other boats like our, where we used high strength cardboard to resist the water. 2. All the boats that didn't sink had one thing in common: large surface area. It may not necessarily be "large" surface area, just large enough to support the weight of the rowers to keep them afloat. The physics behind it is that the larger the surface area, the higher of the water you will remain due to more parts of the boat pushing off the water. 3.this would be important to a captain because if all the mass is lower in the boat, it makes the boat more stable, so if the captain were to sit as low as possible as well as his fellow rower during the race, they would much more stable, as opposed to if one of them stood up and caused most of the weight to remain higher off the boat, causing it to be in stable. 4. Our boat was based off of having the most surface area as possible. Our success was being able to keep the boat very stable through out the race, although our failures was the over all size. It was too big to move at a fast speed so although we made 2 laps of successful rowing, we would never come in first place. We also had the success of the best looking boat, which earned us the swag award. 5. Since I was 10 I have been rowing kayaks up north many days of the summer, so I had the technique down pretty early. The best way was to curve the paddle into the water so the he hole bottom portion of the paddle was under water, and then push off with a slight twist. This gave me power and constant high speed through out my kayaking and cardboard boat runs. In physics terminology, the deeper the paddle, the more surface area I can push off of causing more power to be brought against the boat to keep it moving. 6.I would make the boat a little less wide, shorter, and make the front end a little more sturdier and more hydrodynamic. Thats the only issue we had.

Week 21

So this week, we took what we learned about centripical force the week before and applied it to astronomy. Our own Earth is in centripetal motion as we speak, always being pulled in by the sun, But the earth keeps trying to go straight. Thats why people mention the worries of the Earth losing its orbit around the sun, because the earth will just start going straight into some dark area of space. We also learned that the moon doesn't really orbit the earth... WHAT? Thats right, it doesn't. It goes around one side of the earth, and just goes right back again. Something we didn't mention, but I thought was important that I learned awhile ago is that since all objects have gravitational force, the moon does pull on the earth, which is the reason the ocean has low and high tide. The moon pulls the water on the earth, causing it all to move towards the middle of The ocean, away from the beaches, and then back again. We learned all about how the earth is on an axis, and that it is actually warmer on the earth when were farther from the sun, because the angle it is pointed towards. Over all this week was good for me and it was really interesting.

Week 20 (was not in class)

Week 19

This week we reviewed and learned more information on centripical force. We revised alot of the things we learned the week before. A very helpful test we did of centripetal force was when a fellow class mate was walking in the middle of the class, and the teacher kept pushing her away from the line she was walking on, just like how a person in a car will be pushed to the side of his car when he's turning. By this week, I understood all the standards and the only thing im having trouble learning how to measure the distance using the formula on the assesment, but I got over it. The physics behind centripical is really to understand, so it was fun learning it. It was also interesting learning it because I take the doors off on my jeep in the summer, and its nice to know what direction im going to fly out of my jeep when I turn. Another standard we learned was the different force needed to keep the object in motion while in centripical motion. Thats why when your in a car going around a track, being in tightest part of track would end up pulling the most G's, as oppossed to being on the outside of the track, where the least amount of force is being pushed on you. Some of the questions on the assesment did throw me off, I didn't read them correctly at first, like "what way did the PASSENGER go when the vehicle turned right" I just didn't read it correctly. Over all I liked this subject, and hopefully the next subject we learn will be similar.

Week 18

This week we learned about centripical force. I realize that was spelled wrong. I learned that this is the force that allows a spinning object to be pulled around by a string, and remain in the air by the force of which a counter weight on the end of the string and a person moving the string in a circle. It was really interesting to me on how a smaller radius of the string to weight will actually have a faster velocity than a larger radius, and that i t takes more force to allow a smaller radius to do a full rotation than a larger radius. Weird. We also learned about how when an object on the end of the string, and it is let go going a certain direction, it will fly in the direction of which it was intended to go. Its hard to explain, but if an object is being spun around counter clock wise, if it is let go when its at the north dorection, it fly towards the west direction because thats what way it was going. Another thing i found interesting and easy to understand is that although the object is going the same velocity, the acceleration changes. Since it is always going in a different direction (North west east south),its acceleration is changing. Acceleeation is either and change in velocity or direction. I found the assesment pretty easy, except for the last problems becuse they were almost like trick questions. I got the assesment back today and yeah, i didnt do well on the last questions, but i did well on the rest of them. Last thing, when the object is being flown around, the faster it is going, the more force it expells on the counterweight on the end of the string therefor it requires more force to hold the counter wights down (your hand).

Week 17

This was the final week before mid terms so we did some important reviewing. I beilive it was this week (this class is so interesting that i can never remeber what week we did the most fun activity) that we launched the rocket both horizontally and vertically off the roof. This test was very interesting because it showed that an object being launched upward and an object being lauched horizontally go the same dostance at the same time. I was the one who had to retrieve the rocket it and measure it, abd it turned out to be 150ft out. So that means the rocket went a 150ft high. Thats maybe is the reason people are able to measure how far a bullet can be fired upward without literally going up 10,000 ft in the sky. After that test, we began going over graphs and equations that not only apply to the unit were learning but the mid term, so it was really important to pay good attention this week. We also did a fun activity with some fluffy angry bird toys. We had to be able to drop a ball off a ramp and land on the angry bird that was on the ground in front of the ramp. It was a good test for me because it helped me practice being able to judge how far an object will move when being let go at a certain position I.E how to position the ball on the ramp. There wasnt really anything this week that confused me, in fact ifound myself raising my hand and correcting alot of people that had the wrong answer for a question Mr. Abud asked. A useful concept i learned from this week is how to position something, as said before. So if i ever want to time a water ballon drop from the top of my house to a unsuspecting victim below,Mr. Abud taught me how. All in all i think i can safely say that i understand almost every concept we learned this semester to a good extent, and i have faith that i have not forgotten any of it. I feel very confident about this mid term, so bring it. Im not scared. Well a little, but not enough to make me cry.

Week 14

This week we learned about how unbalanced forces act on a free falling object. We learned that no matter how much an object weighed, it will Fall at the same rate wither a lighter or heavier object. This was really interesting because i figured that a heavier object will always drop faster, but after dueig a test on Monday with a bowling ball and lacross ball, i learned that i was wrong. The next day we took an assesment on acceleration that went well, but i may have made some silly mistakes that could cost my grade. I felt tht doing an actual test outside was more helpful because i was constantly questioning weither the lessons we were learnong are ALWAYS correct. I question alot of stuff. We then began using acceleration Arrows, which are pretty much a dot with an arrow at the end and with each sorter arrow, it represented it was slowing down. If the arrows were longer than it indicated it was speeding up. I understood that pretty easily because it makes sense that the longer the arrow, the more distance has been traveled in the same amount of time. This week had alot to due with using the info we learned from an experiment to use it on a graph, which made it easier and more fun to do. Hopefully the next upcoming weeks, we do similar tests to furthur help our understanding of a unit. I didnt have any problems this week with anything, which is good!

Week 12.

Success! My groups bridge didnt break! This week we finally tested our bridge and it worked perfectly. After the testing of the bridge, we moved on to review. Our older units and refresh our memory on velocity. In our groups we white boarded force diagrams for all sorts of different scenerios. Force diagrams were overall pretty easy for me to understand. As long as all the concepts of how forces act on an object are understood, then the rest of the concepts are easy. We were introduced to a reading device that tracked the velocity of an object (car) dropped down the ramp and plotted its own graph for the info. It was really hard to keep the car straight amd the graph would always come up unaccuratly because of it. We had a sub in this week, and on tht day we had the biggest party ever. Completly insane, i cant even remeber it. We graphed and white boarded so much data that it blew my mind. Kidding, no party, but we stayed on task, white boarded some data that we were gathering from the worksheets given to us that week. Again, a very useful and simple to grasp concept week. Didnt really have any trouble with any thing, besides a little graphing but that was worked out. We were using our previous concept، velocity, alot through out this week to help graph our position vs time graphs. Alot of recapped info, but everything we learned in the beginning is now becoming very useful, not that it wasnt before, now its just more useful!

Week 10

This week we learned about foroce pairs. I found this a very easy subject to understand due to the fact that it has a simply concept. When two forces are equal but pushing in opposite directions and are connected, thats a force pair. For example, when me and Steven arm wrestled, thats a force pair. We pushing equally in opposite directions. Non force pairs would be like me pushing a csr. Theres more force coming from me thsn the force of the car pushing back. See, simple. We then began to review for our assesment on Friday, in which we were given a review sheet (helped alot) and we did a white board activity on different standards on the assesment. I felt that i was pretty prepared for the assesment as i was constantly looking over the review sheet given to us, plus we did alot of demonstrations which are very usefull to A visual learner like Myself. Something i found really interesting this week was that no matter how much an objected weighed, it exerted the exact same force as an opposing object in an equal amount. Both objects will exhert different amounts of presure, but the same force to each other. Overall, i felt pretty prepared this week and the assesment should be a breeze.

Week 15 reflection (remake)

This week i believe was the week before break. This was the week were we accomplished the mouse trap cars. For my groups car, i decided to use a small peice of wood, two axles (locked), and decided for light weight-more traction purposes, i would use the back of paper cups as tires. I covered the tires with rubber bands for added traction. We used a high tech traction control system devolped by Jeep, which gave 25% equal power to all 4 wheels, as well as a new devolped form of a locking differential to keep all 4 tires from spinning and losing traction as well as a 4:1 transfer case ratio for added crawl momentum. Ok, maybe we didnt do all that, but we did put alot of thought into traction. The car itself was well devolped, but it didnt have enough power. No tires slip (thanks to the high tech traction control) but didnt gain too much speed. A crucial part to this experiment as well as to any experiment is the data that goes along with. This is where things got a little confusing. We used the graphing accelerameter to conduct experiments of the metal car going down the ramp. We plotted all the data and it was straight forward, but it was difficult for me atleast to find how much acceleration the car was pickong up, and the formula to find it. Eventually i did figure it out, but for the time being i was still confused. Thats why i think i did so Poorly on the assesment. Overall, a productive week. I did miss foday so i did not see the performancr of our car, but hopefully it was good.

Week 6 (remake)

This week we did multiple tests about velocity and forces. In the beginning of the week, we did the "T Bone Challenge" where we had to release both buggies at the right time in order to have them in hit in the middle. This experiment helped learn how if a certain objects are a cerain distance away and are let go at certain times, they can create a T-Bone. Later this week, we bagan to learn about forces. We learned that what some one weights isnt the content on their body, but the force the earth is exsserting on their mass. An objects mass is what an object is made of. The weight of an object is the force pulling it down, so no matter what your mass is, you will always be a certain weight. At the end of the week we began useing "forceometers." They measure the amount of force an objects exherting onto another object. The tools use Newtons, a measurement of force. For ever 100 grams,it is 1 newton. For being a shortened week, it was still pretty productive. A fellow student reminded me of what we did this week and i still have pretty good memory of it, which means i learned something interesting. We did some graphs (yuck) but it helped in understanding how forces acted on one another, and how to properly measure force. Theres always the dirty unfun work needed to obtain the knowledge to do the fun exciting stuff.

Week 16

Through out this week, we looked at how to graph and keep track of acceleration from any given object, in this case a rocket. We watched as a rocket was launched into the air in almost a straight line, and came back down the same way. We learned that in optimul conditions, any object that goes up, comes back down in the exact speed and direction. When graphed, it looked similar to this: _-_ on a V vs T graph. _- -_ We learned that the exact half of the time taken for the whole trip of the rocket is spent going up, and the other half is spend on the decend. I found all this information useful, because of alot of the activites i participate in involve knowing how objects accelerat in the upward direction. For instance, when a friend and i are in my back yard with a big bundle of bottle rockets, we can look up and see that there is a small gap between the trees that would allow the rocket to safley go up. We now know that when the rocket goes up, it will come down in the same direction at the exact same time. Unfortunatly, we didnt count on the wind that was out that day so im not going into detail on that story. We also learned how to grapgh out the acceleration a rocket gains as its flying through the air. We learned that in most cases of the examples we were learning, the rocket accelerated 10M/S/S which means that for every second, the rocket goes 10m/s faster. So its moving 10m/s, then 20M/s then 30m/s, then back to 10m/s etc as its going back down towards Earth. I found this week very productive for me atleast because the info was very easy to understand and it was something i was espeacially interested in. It was an all new topic, which is why i was very excited about this week.