Science Methods II- Blog 4

1. Lab: How do you design a playground surface that is safe and durable?

In lab, we simulated a child falling on a playground surface using an egg as the child. For the playground surface, we decided to use a mixture of hay and rubber mulch. In our bowl, we layered the bottom with hay, middle with rubber, and the top with another layer of hay. To test the safety and durability of our surface, we dropped our egg child from 1 meter above onto our surface. Our egg child survived, however he also bounced out of our playground area. We then revised our simulation to attempt to make our child survive a 2 meter drop. To do this, we removed some of the hay and plastic from our bowl. We left a smaller layer of the mixture to attempt to not have our egg child bounce out. When testing, he survived the drop, but bounced out of our playground again. 

                                                                            

2. Pressbook Chapter

The chapter about pendulums relates to our lab through Newton's First Law. This law states that objects in motion stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. In a pendulum, friction/air resistance causes the pendulum to slow down and eventually stop. When it comes to the playground, the child was not able to stop their fall without the upward force of the playground surface. Newtons 3rd Law is also at play with our playground simulation. When the egg dropped onto the surface it pushed into the surface. This caused the surface to spread out and some of it to fall out of the bowl. The surface also pushed back on the egg. This caused the egg to bounce back up and out of the bowl.