Projectile Motion Lab

This week, we went down to the gym to shoot basketballs and use the Vernier Video Physics application on our iPads to observe the projectile motion. Projectile motion is when an object is only acted upon by force of gravity.

The Vernier Video Physics app made graphs for the x component and y component:

x (position and velocity)

In the top graph, the slope is constant.
In the bottom graph, the line is relatively constant without a slope.
Since there is no slope, there is no acceleration, so there is no net force

y (position and velocity)

In the top graph, the slope is not constant so it is accelerating.
In the bottom graph, the slope is negative, and the graph should intersect the x axis.
The line shows the path of the object, in this case, a basketball going up, and when it crosses the x axis, it stops (time = 0) and begins to fall down.
There is a slope so there is acceleration.

Then, as our table combined the graphs, we came up with an average slope of -10 m/s^2. We collectively agreed that acceleration is due to gravity.