Drop Height vs. Fall Time Blog

Another day, another lab in physics.  It has been a fun class so far learning how bikes work and why people don't know how they work even if they use it every day.  Just stuff like this every now and then keeps me focused and interested in the class.  Anyways our most recent lab was all about when we drop a ball how long it takes until it hits the ground.  My group predicted that it would be a root relationship with height on the x axis and time on the y axis, and it was.  To be exact we found the equation to be T=0.3587H^1/2.

This part was the relatively boring part, but now using the equation we got, we were able to calculate what we thought the time would be if we dropped a bean bag from 3 floors up on an X on the ground.  We then used a buggy, found the speed of the buggy and started it 2 meters away from the X.  Using the speed we calculated and the time it takes for the bag to fall from that height we found the point that where the buggy crosses where we can drop the bag and hopefully get them both to hit the X at the same time and land the bag in the buggy.  Unfortunately, it hit and bounced off for us, but it was close.