Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

i want to know if any onehas any ideas about how to make a good graph with this data.
i started the hovercraft in grid square 5 . the grid has 9 squares starting at 1 and goes in numerical order.
i know you guys are smart and helpful so please help

thanks

Hi Eric W.,

what is the effect and placement of outlet holes on a hovercraft's speed and stability?

Is the above (from another post of yours) still your project question? The plots(s) that you make should be designed to help you answer your question and evaluate whether or not your data supports your hypothesis.

I think that something is being lost in the conversion of your .xlsx file to .xls, but I am going to take a guess that your data looks something like this (for each hovercraft):

Time (s), Location (number of square)
0.5, 5
1.0, 8
1.5, 2
..., ...
60.0, 7

Of course, your time intervals and total time are probably different.

To approximate the speed at .75 s, you can say that the hovercraft moved the distance between the centers of squares 5 and 8 in .5 seconds. Then you can create a graph of speed vs. time for each hovercraft. You can also calculate the approximate average speed for each hovercraft.

"Stability" is harder to define. My first thought is that it could be related to a hovercraft's tendency to continue traveling in the same direction (e.g. from 1 to 5, then 5 to 9) vs. spontaneously changing directions (e.g. from 1 to 5, then 5 to 2). However, I am guessing that you placed walls at the edges of this grid so that the hovercrafts would stay inside, correct? In that case, it's never possible to continue in the same direction for more than 2 steps before bouncing off a wall. This is likely to make it difficult to evaluate stability in the manner I've described, but you could try.

Amanda

my question is now"does the number of placment holes affect the stablity of a hovercraft?" like i said i put it on a grid.
the speed is taken out and those numbers represent which grid square it is in. thanks

does any one have any ideas yet.

science fair is comming real soon and still dont know how!

Eric,

You need to come up with a quantitative definition of "stability" that can be tested with the data you have. Ideally, this should have happened before you collected data, so that you could make sure that the information recorded would allow you to test your hypothesis.

I gave you a possible definition before: the tendency to continue moving in the same direction, in the absence of collisions with walls. Since in a 3x3 grid, only two 'steps' can be taken in one direction before reaching the edge of the grid, this would be more easily accomplished using a grid with more squares. However, you could attempt to analyze your data in this manner if you aren't able to repeat the experiment.

Amanda