The Future of Education

We are two 9th grade students who are interested in physics and are in the VEX robotics team of our school. We spend most of our time after school planning and building the robot for the competition. We were doing the systems experimentally and not by calculations. With the support of our mentor, our physics interest got intense and we decided to calculate where the ball is going to hit at its maximum height to test if our system would work before building it. We have learned the formula of force, work and the elastic potential energy and kinetic energy in our physics classes [1] . However, calculating the trajectory was not included as it is from the eleventh-grade curriculum [2] . We still wanted to learn how it is calculated so, after some research on the physics concepts, experiments started. The puncher system is used to throw the ball. It works with one motor and it has gear reduction of gear ratio on it to tighten 3 the rubber bands 1 on the system. The motor turns the 36 toothed gear but 12 tooth has sliced and that gear pushes the rack gears back. The rubber bands starts to tighten and when the 36 toothed gear comes to its sliced tooths with the help of the rubber bands the rack gears went forward and hit the ball.The basic procedure is calculating the spring constant ( k ) from the equation F ≡− kx. After finding the spring constant of rubber bands we use in our puncher system we moved onto the next part of the equation. We had to find the velocity of the ball for the projectile motion using the laws of conservation of energy. According to our previous calculation, the constant k was found using F ≡− kx and x by measuring the length of the stretched rubber band, the mass of the ball was already known as 55 g. So there is one unknown variable left to find: the velocity ( v ) of the ball. After we find the velocity of the ball with calculations we needed to find the velocity of the ball experimentally. Then we looked at the margin of error between two results. Next, we found the possible reasons for the difference between experiments result and calculations result. By using the velocity we were able to figure out where the ball would hit when it is at his maximum height. In conclusion we were able to use our knowledge of physics in a real world environment through robotics.

Keywords: Physics concepts, Projectile motion, Calculation;

References:
[1] The official 9th Grade MEB Curriculum
[2] The official 11th Grade MEB Curriculum