Speed Project

8th grade is working on a speed project that will be due next Friday, September 20th. They will be calculating the speed that common objects travel. They will need to pick three objects and measure the distance the object travels and the time it takes to find the speed. ALL MEASUREMENTS MUST BE DONE IN THE METRIC SYSTEM-no credit for any work involving standards units (in, ft, etc).

Students can do this for any three objects, but it must be repeatable because they have to have 3 trials for each. They must have three different objects to measure, that means they may NOT measure how fast mom, dad, and sister walk 50m. I would only count one of those. Ideas: speed of a ball thrown, riding a bike, dog running, ant crawling, air freshener travels across a room, candle melting, soap dripping, whatever!

Students will create a display card that gives a title, a diagram, a data table, and the procedures. They will create one card for each set of measurements. The title should be something creative that tells us exactly what the measurements were. The diagram can be a picture taken or a hand-drawn diagram to show what was done. The procedures need to be detailed and something that another person could follow without any prior knowledge of the experiment. The data table should have space for the trials, distance (probably the same for each trial), the time, and speed. They will also need to calculate the average, so this can be included in the data table. Here is an example of a generic data table. All number must always have units. A number without units is just nonsense and not helpful.

Trials	Distance	Time	Speed
1
2
3
Average