How much did you know about Work and Machines before we started? I didn’t know too much about work and machines before this unit. I think most people, like me, go into the unit expecting work to be the regular or normal definition of work, not force*distance, so it was a bit confusing to get used to at first. I also think that my knowledge of machines has increased dramatically. Before, I knew the basics of how simple machines, like what a lever is, what it looks like, but I didn’t really understand how a lever works and how it’s defined. So things like that were made a lot more clear during the unit, especially since I really think about how simple machines were all around us in real life, like how a screw is made up of an inclined plane.
How would you improve your Inclined Plane Lab report? In my inclined plane report, there could’ve been more detail in explaining my data. Most of the time, I compared the data, but I didn’t go into a lot of description about why they came out that way or way the data was like that. The logic behind some of my reasoning was also flawed and not well supported.
Discuss what would you like to study more about in this unit? Why? I think because we only focused on one simple machine for our GRASP project, I would like to know more about a different type of machine. The one that interests me most out of the 5 left is the lever because there are a lot of different projects you could do seeing as there are different kinds of levers, so exploring different types of levers and simple machines would be what I want to continue studying most out of this unit.
Thinking about work and power–how do you think they will relate to the next unit–Energy? Obviously, from our unit, we already know that work and energy are very closely related because work is basically the transfer of energy. Work is done when energy is transferred onto an object and the change in kinetic energy is equal to the net work done on an object. Power is also related to energy because some units of energy use things like kilowatt-hour. Using one kilowatt-hour of power, energy can last up to an hour. It will be interesting to see how the things we learned in this unit, work and power, relate to our next unit on energy.