February 3, 2001

This morning Dr. Joiner started by asking the famous Shodor riddle. Then he talked about gravity and how it works. He demonstrated its properties by doing a series of experiments. The experiments were dropping a rubber ball on the ground from a certain height and measuring how fast it fell (velocity) and how long it took to hit the ground (time). The students created spreadsheets based on the data of the different times the ball was dropped, then took a break.

After the break, the students went into the computer program GalaxSee and created models of the earth and the sun. They tried to find the velocity of the earth's orbit that wouldn't make the earth collide with the sun (too slow) or fly off in to space (too fast).