I got my copy of Steven Strogatz’s new book back in April:
I’ve used it for two projects with my kids already:
Using Steven Strogatz’s Infinite Powers with a 7th grader
Today my older son was back from camp and I thought it would be fun to try an experiment that is described in the first part of chapter 3 of the book. The experiment involves a ball rolling down a ramp and is based on an experiment of Galileo’s that Strogatz describes.
I started by having my son read the first part of chapter 3 and then tell me what he learned:
Now we took a shot at measuring the time it takes for the ball to roll down the ramp.
I misspoke in this video – we’ll be taking the measurement of the distance the ball travels after 1 second and then after 2 seconds. I’m not sure what made me think we needed to measure it at 4 seconds.
Anyway, here’s the set up and the 5 rolls we used to measure the distance after 1 second.
Here’s the measurement of the distance the ball rolled after 2 seconds. We were expecting the ratio of the distances to be 4 to 1. Unfortunately we found that the ratio was closer to 2 to 1.
We guessed (or maybe hoped!) that the problem in the last two videos was that the ramp wasn’t steep enough. So, we raised the ramp a bit and this time we did find that the distances traveled after two seconds was roughly 4 times the distance traveled after 1 second.
This is definitely a fun experiment to try out with kids. Also a nice lesson that physics experiments can be pretty hard for math people to get right 🙂
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