2-23

We started out our Monday class by walking in and picking up a half sheet. it turned out to be for a graded homework check on pages 28-30. We took about 5 minutes to do that and then after Mr. Manning collected the papers, he asked if anyone had questions. We went over some of them, but not all of them. He went into detail with them and cleared up a lot of confusion, at least for me. When we walked in I also noticed the giant roller coaster sitting on the front table when normally it is in the back, so i was interested to find out what we were doing with it. He pulled a little car out of the drawer and put it on the track. When he let go, the car went down the hill, through the loop, and hit the bumper thing. He repeated this a few times and told us to write down how much energy we thought was lost throughout the trip. I thought that about 10% of energy was lost because it looked like it was going almost the same speed as when it started, but of course there was only a really short part to judge that off of. Then we actually had to figure out how much energy was lost. In order to do this, we had to know the speed. So, Mr. Manning had one of these bar-like contraptions with an inferred light. Someone asked him if he had one at home that he plays with and he said he did. Only his was a bigger one that you could measure really big objects. But anyway, after doing the math we figured that over 50% of the energy was lost, which surprised me because I didn't think much would be lost. This is not Mr. Manings roller coaster but it looks similar up until the loop.