Reflective Questions to address

• What is physics?

Physics is a very very large topic and it basically is the reasoning why things act and move the way that they do. It teaches us the scientific way that simple everyday things to extremely complicated things happen.

• What did you think about the class?

I thought that this was one of the most fun classes i've ever taken at Punahou. Mr Blake made everything very enjoyable and although test were challenging it wasn't to the point where things were overwhelming. Unlink most science teachers at Punahou Mr Blake was much more understanding and wasn't a fake cheerful like some of the science teachers. He genuinely likes his job and enjoys spending time with us which makes everything way cooler because he gets into the labs to!

• What did you learn in the class?

I learned so much that I don't know where to begin this summer has been the most fun I've ever had learning and for once I'm actually sad that school is going to end. I feel like I could learn so much more, and that this was just a sample of what the world of physics has to offer!

• What did you like about the class?

I enjoyed everything about this class surprisingly, normally I don't like science but this has been the most fun science class i've ever had!

• What could be modified to improve on the class?

NOTHING

• Commentary/Feedback?
  

Mr Blake I hope you keep being a badass teacher, and I hope your children have fun at Hanahau`oli. It really is a great school!

We got to use magnifying glasses to light paper during class, that was lame. So instead we mixed dried grass in paper which caught fire pretty easily! It was super fun! #NoFilter #ScienceClass #Physics #BlakesBoiz #TBT #Yesterday

Today in class we started reviewing what reflection is. After reviewing we moved to learning about refraction. Refraction is the change in wave speeds due to change in the medium. The dependent in refraction is medium. A law involving refraction in Snell's Law. Snell's Law is basically an equation... N1(sinO1)=N2(sinO2)... which we use when a light shines through objects and bends different ways. N is the index of refraction, N also equals the speed of light in a vacuum over speed of light in the medium. This is also know / written as N=C/V when we know the angle of light. A couple rules we learned for when light goes through objects are... 
When moving from slow medium to a fast medium light will bend away from the normal.
When moving a fast medium to a slow medium light will bend towards the normal. 

This is a picture of my glasses, I need glasses because instead of the focal point of light being right in the back of my eye it isn't. This causes objects further away to be blurry, I am near sighted and it sucks!

Today we learned a lot about light and light waves. All of class was basically dedicated to learning about light, and light reflection. We did a bunch of cool demos in class which involved projectors with a bunch of different colors all put onto a wall. It was cool because Mr Blake had a bunch of different shadows which were all different colors. We also did research for our song project and that turned out to be very difficult. But back to the light thing. It was super cool because as the lights layered on the wall they changed into different colors it was like actual color mixing except without paint, and there was no mess. 

This is a picture of the green light that was on the board. When we put different colors on top of this color the overall color would change. But if you stood in front and created a shadow your shadow would be different colors. It was sooo sick!

unit 10

Today in class we had reviewed for our unit 9 test for about an hour then took our test which ended at about 10. The rest of class was used for learning about Unit 10 which is about light. Light cannot be seen unless it gets to your eyes. For example you have a sandwich, as you pick up the sandwich you lose sight of some of the sandwich due to the light of the sandwich not being able to reach your eyes because your hand is blocking it. There are many different types of lights used for many different types of situations. For example the military uses infrared to see through walls and detect enemy presence without the enemy knowing. They can do this because our eyes cannot see infrared light which makes it good for when you're being a secret spy agent like 007. So far it is predicted that the speed of light is the fastest thing EVER and nothing will be able to go faster than it. But this hasn't been tested yet so we'll never know until then. Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. Many people think that "light years" is a unit, it is not it simply is the distance travelled going at the speed of light you can figure this out by using D = VT. Time would be one year and velocity would be 3x10^8. 

This is a computer screen, usually you can see all of it. But because my hand is blocking some of the light from the computer screen I can't see it, instead i can see the light coming off my hand which is why i can see my hand. 

In class today we continued learning about Unit 9 and also learned more vocabulary on top of the ones we learned the other day. The new vocab words are refraction and dispersion. When something refracts it's the bending of waves, this is not to be confused with reflection which is when waves bounce. Bats use reflection to locate insects that they eat. They also use it to prevent themselves from crashing into other bats while they're flying around in their cave. We saw in class how ocean waves can bend or spread depending on the shape and slope of the sea floor. For example if the sea floor comes gradually to the beach it won't make waves that have barrels, all you'll get is a huge lump of water. But if the sea floor goes from extremely deep to extremely shallow you'll get something like Sandies or Waimanalo where waves always have barrels and break nicely. In class we've mainly been talking about sound, sound is a mechanical wave traveling through a medium. Sounds shape is a longitudinal wave and it needs a medium to travel. Every frequency of sound travels at same speed and temperatures. Sounds travel fastest through solids.  Humans can't hear all sounds because some wounds are either to high pitched or to low for us to hear. Sound is measured in Hertz or Hz.

Waves at Sandies are good because of the drastic change from deep water to shallow water. All the water is pushed into the shallow water so you have a big surge which leads to better waves. 

Unit 9 - Waves

Today in class we talked about unit 9 and learned a BUNCH of new vocabulary, most of which blew my mind and left me brain dead for the rest of class. Unit 9 is covering waves such as light waves, heat waves, how they move, how they form themselves, why they form themselves like this, and lastly different parts of these waves. Lets go over the basics, Waves are disturbances through matter or space, these are also accompanied with energy transferring. We also talked about how frequencies of waves change, a frequency is the number of cycles that can happen/pass in one second. When writing an equation for frequency the unit is going to be Hertz or Hz. Towards the end of class we all got to see something crazy cool. There was a fancy strobe light that only flashed when the object passed infront of it and because of that we were able to read words on a fan when it was on high speed! I thought it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life, no joke! Because of this we were able to clearly see the nodes, anti-nodes and loops. 

This picture of my spring represents a wave, as you move the spring back and forth the energy will go down in a wave like manner. Once it hits the other end it will come back towards you as a wave. Think of this as echo location, the thing bats use. Bats send out waves and as the waves rebound back towards them they are able to tell where prey is. This is just like that, waves rebound back towards their original starting point, but if you are to far away they wont come back and they will dissipate. 

Rocket blog

• Analysis questions
• What design features were included in your rocket design?
• We made it longer and more massive so that it can have more inertia when flying. We also added two parachutes so that there would be double the hang time. Our bottle rocket was 3 bottles long and weighed around 1lb. We had weights in the nose cone so that i'd be even heavier. The rocket also had 4 fins that were 6'' by 5'' by 3''. These helped in the air time tremendously. 
• What worked as planned?
• The parachutes ended up working on our last try and clutched it up so that we could get 10.16 seconds. These parachutes didn't even open all the way and still were able to increase our down time by 4 seconds. The fins also helped to increase our height by about 30ft and then helped to increase the amount of time to have the parachutes deploy. 
• What did not work as planned?
• Nothing really did not work. All of our things worked as planned. 
• Your launch conditions:
• psi at launch
• Our PSI at launch was 80 psi. 
• Amount of water in bottle
• We had around 1 liter in the fuel tank. 
• What this project taught you:
• The physics learned
• This project taught me that you should always have parachutes when you're in a plane. That way if you need to jump down your velocity downward will greatly decrease and they also will prevent you from splatting on the ground. They do this by increasing the amount of time during impact, and also by slowing you down. 
• the "other" things learned
• Other things that i learned were wind plays a HUGE role in real life. If there was no wind we'd probably not have succeeded but also we probably would not have failed as often. 
• Final thoughts
• This project was super awesome and Mr Blake and Mr Adams should keep doing it every year. This project rocks especially for a 3rd semester project. 

The Mountain Dew bottle is the fuel tank where 1 liter would be poured into. We'd then pump to 80psi and launch.  There are 2 other bottles beside the mountain dew bottles. These bottles were used to add length and more mass. There were double parachutes each parachutes diameter was about 1 1/2 feet wide. This helped us to slow our fall time which helped us to get 10.16seconds. The coke bottle was the top of our rocket and we also used a funnel with clay inside of it to help us have more mass. Chee over 10 seconds!! 

Materials

Three 2 liter bottles 
1 large funnel
Duct Tape
2 Trash bags
String
Hot glue
1 liter of water 
Scissors 
Cardboard for fins.
A pencil
Of course you'll need a launcher which is a bike pump and a rubber stop with a tube that connects to the bike pump. 

Today in class we had our test which I honestly think i did terrible on. It had to do with all the unit 8 things we have learned for the past couple of days. Today was spent mostly on our rockets though, we're building rockets that are supposed to stay in the air for at least ten seconds. We're competing against the other class and hopefully we'll win! My groups rocket consist of three bottles taped together and we'll use 1/2 a liter of water then pump it to about 67psi. So far our rocket has only stayed in the air for a max of 5 seconds but reached a height of at least 50 feet. This rocket isn't one of the best but i'm sure that once we add a parachute it'll be able to last more than 10 seconds. the way our parachute will work is it will be packed inside the nose cone. once the nose cone falls off the parachute will open up and everything will be OK! That is if everything goes according to plan, unlike the egg drop failure. I hope that this rocket does great tomorrow because we have all day to make changes. Chee go team Blake!

Our super nuts rocket :D hopefully this thing can get more than 10 seconds in the air. The coke bottle is the top and the Mountain Dew bottle is where the fuel (water) is stored aka the bottom.

unit 8 part 2

Today in class we learned about (REAL) POWER and how to graph power! (epic rap battles of history joke) Graphing power was super different from our earlier graphs distance vs time, acceleration vs time, velocity vs time. These graphs all used lines where as a power graph is a bar graph. This bar graph will always have Total Energy (TE) and either Kinetic or Potential or maybe even both!

To show power i took a picture of a wave, this wave has lots of mass and so it can only move at a certain speed due to it's mass. The more mass an object has the more power, that means that this wave probably has lots of power because of its large mass. If you were to time the distance a ripple travelled that turned into a wave you could measure the height and the speed and by this you could calculate the power. Power is the  rate at which work is done Power = change in energy / change in time = work time. The unit for power is Watts or Joules. Tomorrow we're having a rocket experiment and I'm very excited! I can't wait to see how high everyones goes, supposedly some can even explode :o

Unit 8

In class today we learned all about energy, Kinetic energy, Potential energy, Spring potential energy, and Total energy. I posted a picture of coffee because it has nutrients that our body uses for energy. Our bodies need energy from the nutrients in this coffee in order to function well in the morning.

Law of Conservation of Energy - Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it only changes forms. Energy is scaler meaning it only has magnitude not direction.

Kinetic energy would be an object in motion, this energy in a moving object is called Kinetic energy or KE. There is also Potential energy, this energy is in objects that are stationary it is written in an equation as PE. There is a final energy which is called Total energy this is the total amount of energy an object can have. This total energy will always stay the same no matter what happens to the object.

A good example of Kinetic energy would be a ball rolling down a hill or just rolling in general. Kinetic energy is just the energy in a moving object. An example of Potential energy would be the coffee can above. It is completely stationary and thus it has the energy to potentially do something so it's called potential energy. Once a stationary object begins to move the potential energy slowly changes from Potential energy to Kinetic energy.

Write Up - Egg Drop

1) Explain clearly and concisely the physics involved, and why your capsule will work.

We thought that our capsule would have worked because we had a not one but two crumple zones. These crumple zones should have increased the time of impact greatly. We also had the egg encased in jello which should have helped to decrease the amount of force on the egg during impact. We also considered that because the egg could fall any direction we tried to cover the entire capsule with a stuffed soft bear. We did not consider that the capsule would hit the ground on its one weak spot.

2) Show the forces that were exerted on the capsule and egg during the impact with the ground.

The forces exerted on the capsule and egg during impact were normal force and  0.5kg x 9.8m/s = 4.9N we thought by lessening the impulse we could protect the egg even better. However the egg could only fall on five on the six sides. If it didn't the egg would surely break.

3) Do a "post-lab" and prepare a "damage assessment" explaining in detail, including the relevant physics, about why it worked and/or failed and what design modifications would be needed to succeed or to make it better for another drop.

Damage Assessment - While falling the center of gravity must have been off and the capsule started to spin very erratically. While falling it spun and decided to fall on the one weak spot that our capsule had this caused the impact time to be extremely short causing a large amount of force to be exerted on our egg... which shattered it. Instead of being protected by the two crumple zones it had no protection except for the jello, which didn't protect it very much. Our egg shattered and jello-y egg got all over my bear :( our egg man died.

Next Time - Next time there is an egg drop you need to have weights on the bottom which will cause it to call on the specific side you want it to fall on. By doing this you can protect that side the most (like we did) and you wont have to worry about it falling on any other side (which we didn't do). If we could do this again I would have put weights on the side with the two crumple zones which would have guaranteed success!

Measurements - 25cm long, 25cm wide, and 27cm tall, it also weighed 0.5kg.



We did not have an after picture because I thought we didn't need one if our egg broke, so I threw it all away.

Unit 7 Part 2

In class today we had a lab which was super awesome and we also learned more about momentum which was quite interesting. We also learned how more in depth about the Conservation of Momentum Law. This law basically states that momentum never disappears it is always transferred when colliding. This law was proven not only in our lab today but also when Cam and Mr Blake were passing the ball around on the reduced friction and zero friction surfaces.

In the lab what we needed was one air track which two carts that would be attacked would sit on. These two carts both had a sail thing at the top. What we had to do was shoot one sail with a nerf dart and measure the velocity of the carts. Record all the data and then use that data to help us solve a number of equations. I thought the carts wouldn't move but surprisingly they actually did move pretty quick, the quickest one moved at 0.54 m/s.

The second example was when Cam and Mr Blake were throwing the ball at each other. As you could see when Cam through the ball momentum from the ball going forward also caused him to go backwards. Same with Mr Blake when he caught the ball he went flying backwards because of the momentum pushing.

Unit 7

Today in class we started a new unit, this unit was Unit 7! We're studying momentum and how it is effected by mass. We also got to do a lab where we got to see how objects with greater mass affected and how they were affected when colliding with other objects of the same, lesser or greater mass. This lab although very long was kind of interesting. When my table group had a heavy cart colide with a lighter cart they both went towards each other then after colliding instead of the heavier one plowing through the lighter they both went back to their starting positions. I thought that this was interesting because I figured based on my experiences that the one with the greater would keep going in the same path. Due to no friction though it went back to its starting point which was the opposite direction of where it was headed. Because this unit is all about momentum I think I should tell you what momentum is.
Momentum is a vector quantity meaning it has velocity and a direction.
The unit for Momentum isn't a pretty one it simply is kg m/s

Law of Momentum (p)
Momentum is always conserved within a system if the total force applied from outside the system was zero.
Momentum (p) = mass (m) x velocity (v)
p=mv

Pfinal - Pinitial = average force x change in time

Average force = change in p / change in time

Change in p = force x change in time = Impulse (i or j)

Impulse = i
i = change in p
i = force x change in time