Projectile Motion

This week in our lab we learned about projectile motion which is analyzing an object in motion.  An important fact is that the object while in the air is only pushed by  a force of gravity called parabolic trajectory.

   In class we went down to the basketball gym and took videos of us shooting in the baskets with our Vernier Video Physics App.  There we then plotted our points and analyzed our data of the video we took.  From our data we then made graphs to show the direction of the x and y components over time and velocity over time.  In determining the data we found the equation is y=mx+b. Y stands for the acceleration, m is slope also velocity, and x is time.

This is a picture of our x component graphs.  The top picture shows the x component of the object over time.  Change of time over change of position equals slope and also the velocity.  Here we concluded that the slope was constant and same for the velocity.  The bottom graph is x velocity over time which equals acceleration.  Because the slope is 0, there is no acceleration on the x component.

This is a picture of our y component graphs.  The top graph shows the y position over time.  Here the change of time and change of position is not constant which means that it accelerates.  In the bottom graph the y velocity time over velocity crosses over the x axis.  This makes the y values become negative for the x values thus showing it has reached it's top height to which it goes down due to gravity.