Testing Our Claims

Today the scholars tested their claims they made about inclined planes/ramps. First they claimed that the heavier you are, the faster you will go down the ramp. Next they claimed that the longer the ramp the slower you will go. To test our claims, we went outside with our stopwatches to find some ramps! 

After testing our claims, we discovered that going down a longer ramp takes more time. At first, we were going faster however the farther down the ramp we got the slower we went. Our thinking is that the height of the ramp or its angle does change the speed.

Our claim that the heavier the person/object the faster you will travel was tricky to test. Each scholar put on a helmet then sat on a scooter to go down the ramp. While we thought this was a good idea, we learned it was not valid due to the scooters not going straight! We had a BLAST anyhow! 

We finished with a class debriefing. In our talks about weight and speed, we referred back to what we learned about weight and gravity from the Egg Drop. The Egg Drop taught us that objects of different weights fell to the ground at the same time. This caused the scholars to infer that this same principle would hold true for us traveling down a ramp. However, the scholars do believe that weight will impact the speed going up a ramp. We decided to test this claim later,