Day 34: Can You Hit The Roadrunner?

Students collected data for the lab challenge. We have several ramps of different steepness near my classroom. The roadrunner is played by a constant speed buggy. The boulder is played by a cart. The tripwire is really just a blue piece of tape. When the roadrunner crosses over the tape, the group releases their cart. During today’s data collection phase, the students do not know where the tripwire will be placed. Their job is to model the motion of the cart so that, when they find out where the tripwire will be, they can use their model to predict how far up the ramp to release the cart.

Here’s a nice clip to introduce the activity: