Apparatus: Apple laptop.
Theory: We had a problem with an elephant on roller skates with a rocket strapped on its back, that came down a hill and then had the rocket ignite in direction opposite of its path. The information that we were looking for was the total distance that the elephant traveled before the rocket stopped it completely and changed its direction. We then took all of the given data and came up with a formula for the elephants acceleration. We could have then integrated the formula two times in order to come up with a position formula in order to find the total distance traveled by the elephant before its direction was reversed, but instead we used Microsoft Excel to find the information that we needed. We plugged in all of our numbers into the appropriate spaces and figured out out that between 19 and 20 seconds after the rocket firing is where the velocity will be zero. The total distance was then calculated to be 248m, which is in line with what the accepted value for this problem was. Each column at the top had formulas(that I cannot remember due to this lab being completed late, which is why I will stay on top of my labs from now on) that were filled down the columns.
1) The results that we achieved numerically were exactly the same results that came from handling the problem analytically.
2) You could tell that the time interval chosen was small enough because when you plug in numbers you would get a number that is almost zero.
3) (do this with spreadsheet in class computer)
Lab Partners were Cesar and Elliot
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