Fan Cart Post

Fan Cart Post

     Our group's goal in this lab was to find the acceleration of our cart, then use that to determine the position in which our cart would collide with another group's cart. To achieve this, we partnered with another group for the majority of the lab. 

Attached on the side is a diagram of what our cart roughly looked like. One important thing to note was that our wheels were frictionless, which meant we could ignore the force of friction when making our calculations. 

     Because each cart had different battery lives, and reacted differently in several different situations, each group got a different acceleration of their cart, which meant that each cart had a different slope on which they travel at. Attached below is the data that both our groups worked on to get.
     We made our prediction based on our calculations below. By finding the accelerations of both the different carts, we could then set them equal in the distance equation and find a point of intersection. However, during testing we discovered that our prediction was off by quite a margin, yet our entire group was puzzled to the reason why. In hindsight, I think this was caused by an error in finding the two accelerations of our carts. Moving forward in the future, our group will be more careful with how we handle our data. Overall, this lab helped me personally see how acceleration really connected with the previous things we have been learning, which really helped me draw that connection during my fall exam.