Week 5: Playground Surfaces

   

 Week 5: Playground Surfaces

Big Q of the Week:

The big question that we are investigating this week is how can we design a safe and durable playground surface. We were tasked with creating a surface that is safe for an egg to drop one meter above and not crack. We used the engineering design process to come up with a solution, test our product, and revise. My group started with a sand and straw mixture with wood chips on top. While the egg did not break on initial impact, it bounced out of our bowl and cracked on the ground. To revise, we decided to create a softer surface with a majority of the bowl filled with straw and the rubber wood chips on top. However we ran into the same problem as before. Finally, we did a majority of the bowl filled with sand, placed plastic wrap down, and filled the top with straw. We found success with this surface and the egg did not bounce out of the bowl. We concluded that too much force would break the egg, there had to be somewhere or something to absorb the energy from the dropped egg to prevent it from bouncing out or cracking on impact. Newton's third law states that forces come in equal pairs, so the force from the egg and the force of impact are weighing on each other. So, energy is transferred from the egg to the surface, initially our egg bounced so potential energy was stored on impact and then transferred back to the egg as kinetic energy. When our egg did not bounce, energy is transferred from the egg to the surface and materials fly off or rub off on one another and the energy stays in the surface and is not transferred back to the egg. 

Egg Drop Data

Learning in Lecture: 

This week in lecture we had our physics exam. 
Playground Surface Model

Textbook Connections 

1. The pressbook chapters that relate to this weeks content would be measuring and describing motion along with Newton's Three Laws that were discussed in all chapters. Through this investigation we had to pay attention to the position of where we were dropping the egg. We first dropped it at 1 meter above the surface and found success, so then we had to move it up further to 2 meters to see if we would have the same results. In the pressbook chapter about pendulums, we were introduced to Newtons third law that forces come in equal pairs. This relates to this experiment because the eggs energy was acting on the surface and vice versa. We had to adjust our play ground surface so that it would absorb the energy from the egg and not transfer it back, causing the egg to bounce. We also know that the only force acting on the egg as it was dropping was gravity, there was no friction. 

2. A part of the pressbook chapters that was helpful for me throughout this week was the energy simulations in Chapter 10, Pendulums and the Energy Lens on Motion. These examples helped me understand how energy is transferred from potential (the amount of energy the egg held that the top of the 1 meter mark) to kinetic energy (the egg falling towards the surface). 

3.  Something I would like to know more about is how the surface around the egg absorbs the energy so that potential energy is not restored back into the egg to cause it to bounce. 

4. I think this weeks investigation was useful to test which playground surfaces are safer for different ages of children. 

Testing our Surface


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