Graphing Your Motion

While doing the lab "Graphing Your Motion" about velocity and acceleration, we ran into a few difficulties. The lab quests that we were using had not been properly charged so we were unable to get the correct readings. The technical difficulties we encountered on our first attempt with this lab were important to realize that a backup plan should always be made. Often people encounter problems with technology so I thought it was a very important lesson as a future teacher. After our setback the first day we felt a little discouraged attempting the lab a second time, but everything turned out smoothly. Our lab quest was properly charged for our second attempt which made the lab a lot easier to understand and follow. During the lab we had to set up a motion sensor which was connected to the lab quest we were using. One of our group members walked slowly away from the motion sensor along the tape we set on the floor one meter apart for four meters. One of the other members dealt with the lab quest and saved the graphs while one was reading the directions aloud and the other was recording the information. It was interesting to see how the change in rate, speed, and velocity changed the look of the graph. When our group member walked slowly backwards away from the sensor, the graph had many evenly spaced up and down moving lines. As we experimented with a faster pace walk the further apart the lines were on the graph. After this we tried to see if one of the group members could match the graph by walking the same speed as before. We found this difficult to get the speed and motion exactly the same as before. I found this lab to be interesting once we finally got past the technological difficulties. I think doing this future in the experiment as a teacher, I would provide more time to experiment with the technology and get used to using it before I assigned questions.