11/9/11 Questions (Reina, Stephanie, Jen)

•What causes the change in daylight hours?

 The tilt of the Earth causes the change.  When the tilt is close to the sun (titled North), then the days are longer, and when farther the days get shorter. 

•When is the earth closest to the Sun? 

 The earth is closest to the Sun in January, so you think it would be warm in January, but it isn't, but the Sun is closest in Jan. 

•Do the seasons and/or tilt depend on distance from the Sun?

 The seasons do not depend on distance from the Sun, as see in when the Sun is closest in January.  If distance played a role, then it would be summer in January, but it isn't.  The seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth, when one part of the Earth is tilted towards the Sun then that part experiences summer.  When the other part is tilted away from the Sun, they experience winter.  The tilt also does not cause in change in distance from the Sun, because the distance is so great that the tilt isn't significant enough to make a difference.

 

•Why don’t the planets crash into the Sun?

The orbital velocity of the planets keeps them from crashing into the Sun.  The planets move quickly enough, and with their gravity, it keeps them from falling into the Sun, instead they fall around the Sun.  Also the planets are so far apart that they don't play a factor on each other, so each planet can stay in its own orbit.

Physics Project PE and KE and a real house

So, here is a little blog post to explain the potential energy and kinetic energy within our experiment.

All of the houses have the potential energy to lift, if enough balloons are added.  The problem lies in how many balloons to add.  With each balloon we added to a house, the weight of the house was lowered.  We had to get the weight to be below 0 for it to actually life.  It was actually quite amazing how with the addition of just one more balloon the house would be ascending.  We could normally tell when we only needed one more balloon.  The house would be hovering above the table, or when we threw it up, the drag would keep it up for a bit before it came down slowly.  Once that last balloon was added, the kinetic energy kicked in and up went the balloon.  To show the importance of the precise amount of balloons, I will refer to our dojo house.  While taking it outside, two of the balloons popped.  The house still went up, but so slowly that the wind would get ahold of it and it would simply come back down.  Two balloons, they made a huge difference in the acceleration of our house.  With 70 balloons the house would go up quickly, and without problem.  But with only 68, the house went up significantly slower.

Also, a fun fact I suppose.  How many balloon would it take to lift a real house?  According to an internet website, a house can weight between 80,000 pounds to 160,000 pounds.  To life a house weight 80,000 pounds it would take roughly 12,271,691 balloons.
Yeah...that's a lot of balloons.

Day 7 Physics Project (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Day 7-

Today was spent making motion graphs, and contemplating data.  We did however make another small house that weighed I believe 29 grams (currently I am too lazy to reference my notes, so we will just go with 29 grams).  Halfway through tieing balloons onto the house, we realized we couldn't remember why we built the house.  So we got it to go up, and then we remembered it was so we could get some more data.  We timed how long it took to go up, and how high it went up.  So yay for data collection!

Day 7 Video (with a song that has nothing to do with flying)-

Physics Project Overview (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Video-

Pictures-

Diagram of Motion-

Example of Forces-

Harwood Diagram-

Day 6 Physics Project (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Day 6-

Today was a miraculous day.  Today our dojo/house thing took flight!  This was the heaviest of all of our houses (besides the first one we made that would take hundreds of balloons).  This house weighed 208 grams, and we at first estimated it would take around 60 balloons to lift.  So, like an assembly line, we began filling the balloons.  We had three helium tanks today so it did not take as long to fill so many balloons.  We got to sixty, and the house did not go up.  So we said probably around 70 balloons.  As soon as we put 70 balloons on there the house went up.

So now that the house went up, we decided we should measure how high it could go.  We took it outside, but this time we tethered it, so we wouldn't lose it.  On the way outside though two balloons popped, so this may have had something to do with why our house would not go up outside.  Yes folks, the flying house would not fly.  We tried, and tried, and tried, but it would only hover and then start traveling to one side.  We did get numerous strange looks though, so the experience was fun, but we couldn't get a real good measure on height seeing how it didn't go very high.  The roof then began coming off, and after the string getting stuck in a tree, we decided to call it a day.  We did not lose the house (thank goodness), but we took the roof off, let the balloons go, and then threw the rest of the house away.

Day 6 Video-

Physics Project Day 5 (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Day 5

So, to be honest, nothing really happened today.  Sad, but true.  We got another tank of helium, in the hopes that it would fix our problem of always running out.  But we didn't have our second tank, so instead of wasting helium knowing it would not be enough to get a house up, we just worked on graphs and our prezi.  Nothing too interesting, so yeah.  But next time our cardstock house/dojo will fly (hopefully, probably...)

Day 5 Picture-

this is the new helium tank

Physics Project Day 4 (Reina, Jordan, and Sabrina)

Day 4-
So today we started by making a new cardstock house to replace our lost cardboard house.  We wanted to make it rather large, seeing how cardstock weighs less than cardboard.  So here are our new cardstock house dimensions-


Height- 0.3683 m
Depth- 0.2794 m
Width- 0.4318 m
Weight- 207 grams


 So the new cardstock house weighs 37 grams more than the cardboard house we lost.  It took thirty balloons to lift the cardboard house at 170 grams, so after some math and rough calculations we figured it would take around 35 balloons to life our new house. (Here is how the math went down- so for every 170 grams it takes 30 balloons, so 170 divided by 30 and rounded is 6.  So each balloon takes off 6 grams.  Now 207 divided by 6 rounded equals 35.)

This was based though on the balloons we used Monday, not the ones we used today, also my math could be wrong which could also explain why when we recalculated we saw it would take around 60 balloons.  With thirty balloons tied to the house the weight went from 207 grams to 120 grams.  So in this case for every 30 baloons the house weight went down by 87 grams.  So lets say we add another thirty balloons, the weight would then go down to 33.  Now divide 87 by 30, and rounded you will see that one balloon takes off three grams.  So we would need around 11 more balloons for those 33 grams.  So after all of this confusing math, it would take around 71 balloons to lift the house.  But the math could be wrong, and depending on how big we filled up the balloons we just decided to say it would take around 60 balloons (cause we could fill the balloons up with more helium than we had been.)

Wow, okay so now that you are probably all confused or just skipped that whole math part, I can say that we did not get the house to lift today.  We got up to 35 balloons and ran out of helium.  The 35 balloons did make a difference on the weight, but not nearly enough, so now we will try again on Monday

Day 2 Pictures in a Video!-

Physics Project Day 3 (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Day 3


So to start off, today I have sad news to share.  Today we lost our cardboard house.  Yes, lost.  I will explain how, but let me start at the beginning.  So today we made a small cardstock house.  Last time our cardboard house didn't go up, so we started even smaller.  It took 12 balloons to get the cardstock house up.


Cardstock Measurements-


Height- 0.2286 m
Wide- 0.2032 m
Deep- 0.1778 m
Weight- 55 grams

As you can see from the measurements the house was much smaller, and we were elated when it went up. We even made everyone look to see our success.  So we decided to try the cardboard house again.  Jordan had gone and gotten some balloons will up with helium that were much larger than the balloons we used on Monday.  We began tieing the balloons on, until we had thirty balloons tied to the house.  Our helium had run out, so that was all we could do.  The house hovered, but did not go up.  We were determined though so we cut a part of the roof off, made two windows, and cut some of the bottom off.  We cut 34 grams off of the house, and yes my friends, it took flight.  We also calculated the the volume in the balloons was about 20,580 (and that is relying on my math, so that may not be correct).

We were so happy that we decided to take the house outside and see what would happen.  We took it out front, and then I let the house go.  It took less than 3 seconds for the house to get out of my reach.  I jumped and tried to catch it, but it was too gone.  The wind took our house up, and we chased it through campus, across central, and we finally stopped a Gold and Buena Vista and spent 10 minutes just watching it, hoping it would come down.  Although it was a sad loss, I must say it was a wonderful sight.  The movie basically came to life, and it was nice seeing all the confused looks on people's faces as they watched a little house tied to balloons fly away.

In the beginning we had wanted our house to go up 2 meters.  The house outside went up so high it became a little black dot in the sky.  Now we didn't measure it or anything but I think that it was higher than 2 meters...a  lot higher than two meters.

So what now?  Well first we have to make another cardboard house, and then we are going to see if we can control the direction of the house.

Day 3 Pictures-

Day 3 Video-

Motion Project (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina) Day 2

Day 2


Today we decided to maybe start a little bit smaller.  So if you look at pictures from our Day 1 you will see that our house is pretty large.  Also if you were to lift it up you would see it is also heavy.  So we needed to test our 'balloons making house lift' theory on something smaller.  We made a small house, about an eighth of the weight. Then we filled up some balloons with helium and tied them to the house one at a time.  We thought that with maybe ten balloons the house would lift off of the ground.  We were wrong.  We tied all thirty balloons on and nothing happened.  Well, actually, something did happen.  The weight of the house dropped from 170 grams with no balloons to 120 with thirty balloons.  After some math we figured it would take 72 balloons to lift the small house off the table.  And what about the big house you ask?  572 balloons.  Yeah, that's a lot of balloons.  So I guess today our small house got promoted to our big house. 


Day 2 Pictures

Day 2 Video

Motion Project (Reina, Jordan, and Sabrina)

Supplies:

• Cardboard
• String
• Balloons
• Helium
• Duct Tape

Objective: To build a house and lift it two meters using balloons filled with helium.

Where we got the idea: If you have seen the movie Up, well then that is where we got our idea.  If you haven't, well in the movie the most adorable elderly gentleman ties a ton of balloons to his house in order to take flight.  He lifts his house off the ground and simply flies away.  So we are making a small scale model of that, and trying to figure out how and why it works.
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Day 1: Today we focused on building our house.  We took some cardboard boxes and constructed what looks more like a barn than a house, but none the less it will serve our purpose.  Then we poked holes in the roof so we could tie string to the house.  We will then tie baloons filled with helium to these strings, and off our little barn/house should fly.  We then measured our house and weighed it.  This was the data we collected: 


House measurements: .4318 meters wide  .3556 meters high  .4826 meters deep
House Weight:  1 lb and 14.68 oz.


This is all we did today, due to our lack of balloons filled with helium, but we are one step closer to sending our house into orbit (or 2 meters into the air...same thing).


Day 1 Pictures:

Activity Model for Inquiry (Reina, Jordan, and Sabrina)

So far for our experiment we have-

1. Made observations- we made numerous observations about the candle's weight, look, color, limitations, abilities, etc.
2. Formed the question- does a candle produce enough heat to cook an egg, a thinly sliced piece of ham, and a pancake?
3. Defined the problem- how do you construct an oven with candles that will cook all the things we want to cook.
4. Investigated the known- we looked on the internet to get ideas on how to make a candle oven.
5. Articulated expectation- we hypothesised that in order to cook a piece of meat it needed to be thinly sliced, the egg and pancake also needed to be relatively thin, and we would need an adequate amount of candles to provide enough heat.

Complex Moving of the Bean (Day Two/Final Day)

How to move a bean (or multiple beans) one meter up and one meter over.  This was the question that baffled us, up until the final day.  The basic construction of our device was a counterweight system.  We placed a meter stick  in the sink and tied a rubber band around it near the top.  Then we placed a cup in the rubber band, and a bean in the cup.  Next we taped a box behind the meter stick on the counter, and rigged up another ruler on top of the box.  Finally we set up the counterweight system with a paperclip on one side (with a bean attached to it) and a bag of pinto beans on the other.  In theory, what was supposed to happen was we would drop the bag of beans, this would raise up the paperclip with the bean, and also hit the ruler.  The ruler would fly up and hit the up with enough force that it would send the bean inside flying at least a meter.  This worked only about 2-5% of the time, but that's at least better than 0%.  Below are pictures and a video showing what we constructed (early apologies about the video being sideways).

Complex Moving of the Bean (Day One)

 Move a bean one meter up and one meter over.  Much more difficult than it sounds.  Day one consisted of a lot of thinking, wondering, and hoping that our idea would work.  The pictures show what we created, now we will see if it will actually work on Wednesday.

Bean Zipline Process

Four notecards, two beans, a meter of string, ten centimeters of tape, and two paperclips. Objective: move the bean a meter. Result: a zip line using all of the supplies (along with the help of a standing ruler). The process started out with the notecards, trying to figure out a way to stack them in a way that would create a workable zip line. Turns out flat notecards don't hold weight very well, but notecards folded into triangles- perfect. So with our triangular notecards, we made our zip line. We taped the beans to the paperclips, then we strung the paperclip on the string, and we expected it to fly- it didn't. The string was giving away too much slack, so we figured we needed to elevate one set of the notecards more. We placed it on a laptop; the bean was still not moving the whole meter. So the new objective was to raise the zip line more, we did this by taping one set of notecards to a standing ruler (38 inches tall standing ruler to be exact). We taped the other notecard to the table, and made sure the string was tight. Then came the real test, we placed one paperclip with the bean on the string, and it made its way successfully down the zip line. We tried the other paperclip, and it worked out perfectly, objective: complete.

For pictures of this spectacular device go here- http://jordanblinn.blogspot.com