Physics Toy Car Lab - Conclusion

The purpose or reasoning behind conducting this lab would be to determine the relationship between the position of the car and the time elapsed. My hypothesis for the relationship was that the car would travel at a constant speed. Based on the data that was accumulated, my hypothesis was valid. Our group found out that the toy car’s distance/time slope was .32m/s. Which in words means that the car was always traveling at a constant speed. The relationship between distance and time is proportional, which indicates that as distance increases, the amount of time increases proportionally or at the same rate. For every second that our toy car was in motion, its position changed .32 meters. Just before I state my math model I want to make clear that my dependent variable was time and my independent variable was distance. For our experiment our math model turned out to be Distance = 0.17 meters /second x time + .05 meters. The idea of having a y-intercept befuddled my group at first, but we realized that having a y-intercept was evidence that we messed up some part of our data accumulation process. Which in other words means that we had committed some errors throughout the experiment. Below I will list some of the possible things that may have altered our data thus creating a y-intercept. The person turning on the car and the person starting the stopwatch couldn’t theoretically be synced, which results in additional or less time than the actual time that the car traveled. Another way that we could have messed up would be if the person placing the car placed the car at an angle, which would mean that the car would be traveling a greater or shorter time to cover the distance we are collecting data for. Any of these errors above could have happened causing our data to be slightly off. So, in conclusion having a y-intercept in the experiment is a way to show that something went wrong during data collecting process. Throughout this experiment we learned some new terms. Displacement, position, and velocity. Displacement is the change in position or ( X). Position on the other hand is a place where something is located or has been put. You can find displacement by taking the Final Position and subtracting it with the Initial Position. Velocity is the rate of position change. You can find velocity by taking the change in position over the change in time also written as displacement over time elapsed ( X/ T). These terms lead to a formula that can be used to find the final position for any object that is travelling at a constant velocity (not speed, because velocity and speed are two different things. Speed has no direction, while velocity has direction.). Average Velocity x time + initial position = Final position (In words: How far something moves in a particular amount of time multiplied by how long it was moving plus the initial position = the final position). Some things that move at a constant velocity would be battery operated planes, electric bikes, and electric skateboards. For example, let’s say a car is moving 65 miles an hour eastward. If we were trying to figure out where the car would be in 4 hours our equation would be: Final Position = 65mph x 4 hours + 0 miles = 260 miles eastward. From this lab, I learned that relationship between time and distance, new terms such as displacement, velocity, and position, the meaning of y-intercept and slope, the dependent and independent variables, and finally the formula that can be used to calculate the final position if there is a constant velocity.