In this experiment, my group mates and I were studying two dimensional motion by measuring the velocity of a free falling object at different moments during the fall. We did this by dropping a penny from a height of 25cm next to a ruler and a timer, recording it in slow motion so we could play it back and see how many seconds it took for the penny to reach several benchmarks. We measured in increments of two centimeters, so we would take a video for each drop and record our observations. With the position of the penny at a given time, we know the distance it traveled and the time it took to fall so we can solve for the speed using the equation Speed=Distance/Time. To calculate the acceleration of the falling penny, we used the formula Acceleration=Final Velocity- Initial Velocity/Time, where initial velocity is 0 and we plug in values from each drop to collect data. We calculated the average of our values and came out to an outrageous number of 340.471 m/s^2. We then calculated our error percentile and it was 33% which explains our high acceleration average.
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