Some of you are feeling really uncomfortable right about now; not sure what you should be doing with your lab, maybe a bit confused or frustrated. Believe it or not, those are good things. It means you care about doing this right, getting a good grade and maybe even learning something! It’s called taking you out of your “comfort zone” and it’s the place where some real learning can happen.
In this lab you were to examine mechanical advantage using a simple machine called an incline plane. That means you were going to investigate, experiment and play with an inclined plane to see if changing it in someway had an affect on this thing called mechanical advantage.
Our approach was to start with things we already knew. Some of this came from notes on work, and ideal and actual mechanical advantage. Other things came from prior labs where we used an incline plane and/or where we measured different forces. This gave us some ideas on how we might conduct an experiment.
Next was to do some background research. This is where you go exploring. Look information up in your textbooks, other classroom resources and the internet. The more you know about incline planes, ideal and actual mechanical advantage, work and efficiency the better. Part of your research should also have included “playing” with the equipment — doing some testing to see what happens and how to best set it up.
Out of this comes your experimental design, how you will conduct the experiment, what you will measure, and your hypothesis. Skimping on the research and design results in poor quality and wasted work. Planning is very important.
Now you are collecting the data and calculating various things like work, mechanical advantage and efficiency. You’re also making graphs, drawing conclusions, looking for patterns and making comparisons.
Some of you are doing an excellent job — keeping up with your classwork and doing some extra at home. It pays off by giving you some time to discuss your findings with me and confirm that you have done the write-up properly.
Keep up the good work. There is more pleasure in succeeding at something that is difficult than there is when you take the easy route.
hi mr. grant i would like to know if this would be appropriate for class : Chuang Chuang the Panda is just too heavy to have sex. Thai authorities have put him on a strict diet as part of a long-running campaign to get him to mate with female partner Lin Hui at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand.
“Chuang Chuang is gaining weight too fast and we found Lin Hui is no longer comfortable with having sex with him,” said the zoo’s chief veterinarian, Kanika Limtrakul, adding that Chuang Chuang weighed 331 pounds while Lin Hui is only 253 pounds.
As a result, zoo authorities are cutting out bamboo shoots in the daily meal for Chuang Chuang and giving the obese bear only bamboo leaves, Kanika said.
The diet plan is the latest in an unsuccessful and often strange campaign by zoo officials to get the two bears to mate.
They have held a mock wedding, announced plans to separate the two to spark a little romance and even talked of introducing panda porn — videos of other pandas mating — to get the pair in the mood.
Thailand rented Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui from China for $250,000 in October 2003 for 10 years. They are expected to generate millions of dollars in revenues from Thai and foreign tourists.
There are as few as 1,600 giant pandas in the mountain forests of central China, according to the zoo. An additional 120 are in Chinese breeding facilities and zoos, and about 20 live in zoos outside China.
Pandas are threatened by loss of habitat, poaching and a low reproduction rate. Females in the wild normally have a cub once every two to three years.
see my answer under report card post