Launch An Object At A Higher Distance Lab Report

The purpose of the experiment was to figure out a way to launch an object at a higher distance.Things that will affect the experiment are Potential Energy, Kinetic Energy and The Law of Conservation of Energy.There are two main types of energy Potential Energy and Kinetic Energy. Potential Energy is the stored energy within an object. It is affected by mass and position. An object being held off the ground had Potential Energy because it is being weighed down by it’s mass and pulled down by gravity. Something like a spring or rubber band being pulled are examples of something with Potential energy, although they are not being held off the ground they still have Potential Energy because their positions are being changed by stretching and compressing.

In the experiment our group had the option to change the mass of the ball of clay or the height from where it was dropped. The option that was chosen was to change the height from where the clay was dropped. We balanced the ruler on the lincoln log to then placed the minion on one side of the ruler. We stood the meter stick upright, the zero being closest to the table. Then we made a ball of clay and dropped it from a specific height making sure not to change it. We started dropping the clay at 15 centimeters and increased the height by 5 centimeters.The heights were 15 cm, 20 cm, 25 cm, 30 cm, and 35 centimeters.To collect more accurate data we took 3 trials every time the height was changed. This means that we did a minimum of fifteen trials making sure that the clay hit the back of the ruler and not just part of it, like the side of the ruler.To better analyze the data the group took a slow-mo video of each trial to better determine the height that the action figure reached. We kept the data in a table, after each trial we found the average of the three trials.We did this by adding the data for the three trials of the heights that the clay was dropped from. Then divided the sum by the number of trials. We repeated this for each height where the clay was