Mini Roundabout

I'm trying to do some real physics with the data I collected yesterday.  Homing in on one section of the drive, I plotted the velocity and acceleration vector diagrams.

 The accelerations are particularly interesting showing a combination of breaking/ accelerating along with centripetal accelerations.

Test Drive

It's half term so I decided to take VERTIGO for a test drive. I found that the GPS did not work if there was anything in the way of the vertigo so I added a GPS antenna.  The results were very good. Using MATLAB to analyse the data I got some good data.

Using the online tool some additional data could be added including a map feature which I think the pupils will like a lot.

The height graph from the online tool was nice but could do with labels on the axis.

Testing Vertigo

Vertigo is a data recorder designed for use in schools. It records the sort of data that a black box recorder does. It logs GPS, acceleration and gyro data.  This can be combined in a number of ways by MATLAB software to give multiple displays of the recorded data.

As a teacher this tool gives my students the chance to log in real detail the motion of anything.  I have told a few classes about it and after the half term holiday I will be looking at the proposals for how it can be used.

The first project using the VERTIGO was carried out by a Higher Physics student Glen.  She wanted to show how Newton's second law could be used to measure the mass of people in space.  This gave us a chance to use just one sensor on the vertigo, acceleration in the x direction.  The data was imported into a spreadsheet then extracted by sorting by data type and sorting to find the maximum x acceleration. Choosing such a simple experiment first was a real benefit because it allowed us to study how the raw data was stored and how to separate it.