Kelsey Burns

2012

October 14,

Science Seminar

Our goal in this seminar was to try to make the egg slide across
the playing board without breaking it. This experiment was based off of
Newtons 3 laws. His first law states that an object at rest will stay at
rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Some people refer to this
law as the law of inertia or lazy law. His second law states that the
acceleration of an object as produced by net force is directly
proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction of
the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object. His
third law states that for every action there is an equal or opposite
reaction.

The materials that we used were 2 cotton balls, 1 rubber band, 1

piece of clay, 10 toothpicks, 1 3x3 piece of cardboard, 1 mailing label,
and 2 straws. The piece of clay was very hard to mold onto the egg
because it didnt stretch well. It was also very thick and the color that
we chose was blue. We thought that if we covered the egg completely
in clay that it would help it from breaking but that didnt work out too
good. We used the cotton balls just to see if it would give any support.

Our procedure from the very beginning of the lab is as followed:

1. We gathered our materials to start the experiment.

2. First we tried molding the clay onto to egg, which was difficult.
3. Then we took the excess clay and formed the egg onto to piece
of cardboard.
4. Next we stuck the toothpicks into the cardboard to make a kind
of barrier or cage around the egg so it wouldnt fall out of place.
5. Finally we stuck the mailing label on the bottom of the cardboard
piece and put our creation in the zip lock bag.
Our results were not how we planned them to be. Since we only had
6 minutes to complete the experiment we didnt use all of the
materials. We thought that since our egg was covered, molded, and
secured that it would have no problem sliding across the playing field.
When we attempted to roll the cue ball down the incline to push the
egg creation across, our egg immediately cracked. It was not cracked
fully open but we could hear the crunch of the shell as the cue ball hit
it. After several attempts, we lost all of our tries to make it go further
across the playing field. We had 7 tries to make it to the finish line and
we only got to about mark 20. After seeing all of the other groups go
we soon learned different methods to help the egg move farther
across.

Some observations that we made throughout the experiment were

that if your egg was completely covered with all of the materials it
would have less of a chance to break. Also, that the higher you make
the incline, the more acceleration will be produced from the cue ball.
This also causes a greater force of the cue ball. For example if I were to

slide the cue ball down with an incline of 80 degrees, the cue ball
would slide very fast and very forceful down the incline. Where as if I
had the incline at about 40 degrees, the ball would move much slower
and would not have as much force when pushing the egg creation
across the board.
This presentation could relate to my everyday life because my
everyday life consists of Newtons 3 laws, which is the theory behind
this experiment. For example, Newtons first law would relate to my life
because if I were sitting on the couch nothing would get me up unless
another force, forced me to get up. My life would relate to Newtons
second law because if I was to slide a moving box down a wooden
incline, depending on how high or low the incline is would determine
how much the moving box would accelerate. My life would relate to his
third law because if I was jumping up in the air from the ground, there
would be opposite reactions happening. I would be putting pressure
and force downward towards the ground while ground is doing the
same thing except its forcing upwards.

One concept that made an impact on me was the cause and

effect between the incline and the amount of acceleration that was
produced after it. This stood out to me because I have done many
experiments with the same theory but it wasnt exactly the same
presentation. We would just set different inclines and see how fast the

object could accelerate down it but we never had the next step that it
had to move an object across the ground. As the experiment went on I
started to realize that the amount of incline also determined the
amount of force that was put on the egg from the cue ball.

The type of science that this presentation covered was biology.