Reflection of the Week - 9/26/11 - 9/30/11

Cartoons, cartoons, cartoons. Any person with a decent childhood can remember Wile W. Coyote and The Roadrunner. That's why, for our Physics project, my group is trying to analyze the physics of Wile E. Coyote. Falling of enormous cliffs, walking on air, with all the crazy things the Coyote manages to do, how does Physics really come into play? That's what we've been trying to do all week.

First we started thinking of things we wanted to check out. We came out with three main things:

1.      How far does the Coyote usually fall off a cliff, and how he is catapulted when he doesn't fall?

          2.   How fast does the Coyote go so that he is able to walk on                   air?

3.      What happens so that an Acme Bear Trap is set off with a drop of oil and not an entire bowl of Acme Bird Seed?

Then we set out to find some videos, thank you YouTube! All three videos were pretty easy to find (good old Wiley falls off cliffs pretty often), especially the third one since it's a very selective scene. Next we found out the average weights and measurements of a coyote and roadrunner. We had to assume that both Wile E. and The Roadrunner are about average, as there are no hard facts on them, and they're obviously not correctly scaled anyway. After all this we started a GoogleDoc Presentation and started piling the information and videos together. That brings us up to date. Right now we are "prototyping" calculations. We're not quite sure how to calculate how fast Coyote has to run to walk on air, so we're working it out. So that's what we'll be doing all next week, trying to find the best way to calculate all this physics stuff!