Procedure…For the Free Fall experiment.

In this experiment the team used the device that was latched to the side of the table to measure
and calculate the time it would take for the drop ladder that had black strips that were equally spaced
apart from the other, to hit the ground. We meassured the distance from the bottom of one strip to the
top of the next and entered the information into the computer. The device had an infrared beam that
measured the drop ladder as we would drop it to the floor. The software measured the activity and
stored the information. Using the cricket graph, having a value of ’g’, the free-fall acceleration at the
earth’s surface was obtained.

Once we used the ULI, we opened the event time’s software from the MBL folder and
configured the software for a two second interval. The software analyzed the distance between the
black strips on the drop ladder as well as the width of the strips. After several trials of dropping the drop
ladder, we chose the data that best represented the exercise and that made the most sense and saved
the data to a CG spreadsheet.

We found ‘g’ from the average of the acceleration values in that was in the event software
table. We plotted the ‘v’ versus‘t’ and found ‘g’ from the slope. Next we plotted ‘x’ versus‘t’, found the
values of ‘g’ by choosing a quadratic best fit. The values of ‘x’ were then multiplied by‘d’. ‘D’ represented
the distance between the strips. ‘X’ has the form ‘x’ =vot+(1/2)gt2. Finally we copied the spreadsheet
and the graphs and placed them together.