You've been looking at the nature of motion and defined it as change of position with respect to time. For this activity we regard our motion to be in one dimension so we can ignore any unnecessary vector representations that encumber our studies. We merely look to explore relationships between displacement, velocity and acceleration.

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    Your instructor will show you briefly how to set up and run the ULI motion detectors. This device is sort of like radar. It sends out an ultrasonic wave (hence the abbreviation letter U) and the signal bounces back. The computer measures the time between sending the signal out and receiving it back. From this we can get various information including distance, velocity and acceleration. You can collect certain information and plot it using EXCEL.

    You'll need to have the instrument turned ON. Your instructor will help you get the instrument working. Here's the things you need to plot:

1. Take the instrument in hand and point the sensor at a stationary object . Move at a constant speed away from it. Stop. Move at a constant speed towrds it. Draw first what you expect the graphs (of position vs time and velocity vs time) and then use EXCEL to actually make such graphs. Your data comes out as .cvs files but can be loaded into EXCEL and plotted. Your instructor will help.

2. Set the instrument on the floor (sensor pointing upwards) and drop a coffee filter (your instructor has great big ones to do this with) and calculate two things. The acceleration and the terminal velocity.

3. See if you can make a sine wave graph of position vs time with the sensor and and object. Explain to the reader what is going on.

Complete your discussion and state conclusions you can draw from this simple activity. This is a short activity so it should go quickly.