Quote:
Originally Posted by Flieger
Oooh, good deal. Did the data support the kinetic vs. potential energy tradeoff when using the frictional work (distance travelled) as a measure of kinetic energy?
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Yeah, well this is first grade, so we kept it simple. Heck, they're just working on addition and subtraction at this point.
We took a bunch of cars and weighed them. Then we ran them down the track. There was no correlation between weight and distance. (Obviously because of all the variables involved--mainly rolling resistance, i.e. cattywompus wheels.) So we took two individual cars--one light car that went far, and a heavy car that didn't go too far--and ran them again: car alone, car with one coin, car with two coins. For each individual car, the heavier the car, the farther it went.
I decided to postpone the lecture about GPE --> kinetic energy for a couple more years.