My son (6th grade) would like to do the following science fair project...he wants to jump his remote control truck off a ramp set at different angles and measure which angle makes the car travel the furthest distance. First of all, is this an appropriate project? And my main question at this stage is what topic would he focus his research on? This is a fairly informal science fair (only a small homeschool group) so I don't think he needs to get too technical, but he needs to do some basic research. Also, would this particular project have a "control".
Thank you so much for any input you can provide!!
Research related to ramps
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bfinio
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Re: Research related to ramps
Hi wg3,
I would suggest your son do research related to "projectile motion". "What angle will make a projectile go the farthest?" is a pretty common high-school physics problem, and you should be able to find plenty of resources online. However, the "projectile" is usually a ball - so launching a remote controlled car off a ramp is certainly an interesting twist! My only concern would be damage to the car - you wouldn't want to break it after your first test, so maybe it would be good to have a soft landing area made of pillows or blankets.
Also, this particular project would not have a "control" in the traditional sense (like with a medicine trial where the control group gets a placebo). Your independent variable is the angle of the ramp, and there isn't really a way to set a "control" for that.
Hope this helps,
Ben
I would suggest your son do research related to "projectile motion". "What angle will make a projectile go the farthest?" is a pretty common high-school physics problem, and you should be able to find plenty of resources online. However, the "projectile" is usually a ball - so launching a remote controlled car off a ramp is certainly an interesting twist! My only concern would be damage to the car - you wouldn't want to break it after your first test, so maybe it would be good to have a soft landing area made of pillows or blankets.
Also, this particular project would not have a "control" in the traditional sense (like with a medicine trial where the control group gets a placebo). Your independent variable is the angle of the ramp, and there isn't really a way to set a "control" for that.
Hope this helps,
Ben
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wg3
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Re: Research related to ramps
Thank you so much for your help!!
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HowardE
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Re: Research related to ramps
This is a surprisingly popular topic with kids for science fairs. Well, maybe considering how much kids love RC cars it's not all that surprising. Put the topic into a search engine and you'll find a lot of discussion about how to do this and what the results might be.
http://lessonplanspage.com/ScienceExCar ... yMO68.htm/
https://www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/2003/P ... /J0216.pdf
https://prezi.com/8lqt_ujs3z3c/google-s ... r-project/
http://how360.org/physics/56579/acceler ... ined-plane
That's just a few of the sites I found on the first page of a search. Perhaps one of the trickier aspects of testing this is making sure the car always goes up the ramp straight and always at exactly the same speed. As the batteries run down the car is going to go a little slower which wil cut down on the jump length. You could cook up a way of measuring the speed as the car hits the ramp or you could just make sure it's always going full speed by using a fresh battery (or freshly charging the battery) before each jump. If you use the suggestion on one of those pages above, you'll be jumping into sand which solves the breakage problem as well is making it easy to tell exactly where the car landed.
It would be a fun project to work on. The RC car I built in the mid 80s was an Associated RC-10, aluminum chassis car with a handwound motor and some other special goodies in it. It could easily jump 40+ feet and land on its wheels (most of the time) and has been measured at 61 MPH. Cars are much faster now, but also more breakable since the aluminum cars have all turned into plastic and carbon fiber. As Ben said earlier, be careful about breaking the car too early as you need to keep it alive for all of your trials.
Howard
http://lessonplanspage.com/ScienceExCar ... yMO68.htm/
https://www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/2003/P ... /J0216.pdf
https://prezi.com/8lqt_ujs3z3c/google-s ... r-project/
http://how360.org/physics/56579/acceler ... ined-plane
That's just a few of the sites I found on the first page of a search. Perhaps one of the trickier aspects of testing this is making sure the car always goes up the ramp straight and always at exactly the same speed. As the batteries run down the car is going to go a little slower which wil cut down on the jump length. You could cook up a way of measuring the speed as the car hits the ramp or you could just make sure it's always going full speed by using a fresh battery (or freshly charging the battery) before each jump. If you use the suggestion on one of those pages above, you'll be jumping into sand which solves the breakage problem as well is making it easy to tell exactly where the car landed.
It would be a fun project to work on. The RC car I built in the mid 80s was an Associated RC-10, aluminum chassis car with a handwound motor and some other special goodies in it. It could easily jump 40+ feet and land on its wheels (most of the time) and has been measured at 61 MPH. Cars are much faster now, but also more breakable since the aluminum cars have all turned into plastic and carbon fiber. As Ben said earlier, be careful about breaking the car too early as you need to keep it alive for all of your trials.
Howard