week of 10/26/09 :)

This week we learned about graphing data with the position and time axis. Position is how far the object is from the origin. (in negative or positive direction) Time is the clock reading, for example, 1 second, 2 seconds, etc. We also learned that you shouldn't connect the points on your graph. The only time you should draw a trend line is when your sketching a graph and not plotting the points exactly. A trend line is a line showing the general direction of the data. This applies to real life because graphs are used a lot and it's important that we understand them.
This week we also drew sketches of what certain graphs look like. We figured out that graphs that are going at a constant speed are lines that are straight, but are at an angle. The steeper the line, the faster the object is going. The lines on graphs that show speeding up motion get more vertical as the graph goes on. And lines for graphs that show objects slowing down get more horizontal as the graph goes on. Now we can instantly tell what some graphs are trying to say without reading all the labels.
We learned that an object can be at a positive or negative position, it just depends where they are compared to the origin. Our class wasn't sure whether or not you could have negative time. So Mr.Finley applied it to real life! He said that when you have an injury, you get to leave class about 5 minutes early. So let's say class lets out at 10:00. 10:00 would be like the origin, and someone who is injured would get to leave at 9:55, which would be negative time.
At the end of this week we worked with the motion detectors. We tried to re-create the graphs that Mr.Finley drew on the chalkboard. We also thought of ways of how we could defeat "Batzilla" while using the motion detectors.