Sophie in the snow: a simple approach to datalogging and modelling in physics
Issue 339 | Page 83 | Published Dec 2010
Description
Most students now have access to devices such as digital cameras and mobile phones that are capable of taking short video clips outdoors. Such clips can be used with powerful ICT tools, such as Tracker, Excel and TI-Nspire, to extract time and coordinate data about a moving object, to produce scattergrams and to fit models. In this article we illustrate the techniques using a video clip of a student coming down an icy slope on a toboggan, and show how we can collect enough data to make a good estimate of the coefficient of friction between the toboggan and the ground.
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