Pendulums at Oak Hill!

Pendulums:  To and Fro We Go

Today’s lesson focused on pendulums.   The motion of pendulums was one of the many phenomena investigated by the famed scientist Galileo over 400 years ago and what he learned about them had a huge impact on the history of technology. The periodic motion of pendulums allowed for the invention of clocks and the standardization of time, and they still have many uses in modern society.

Students saw that a pendulum consists of a pivot point with a rope or wire attached to it and a mass on the end. The time it takes the pendulum to make one full oscillation back and forth is called the period. Here, gravity is the only force working on the pendulum. If we took the same pendulum and put it on the Moon, the pendulum would have a slower period due to less gravitational force. Some examples of items that use pendulums are metronomes and grandfather clocks.

For the activity, students constructed their own pendulums and then changed the variables of it to see if mass, length, or angle affected the period of a pendulum. The students did a great job working in teams and discovered that only length caused the period of the pendulum to change:  a longer length correlated to a longer period.

Students really enjoyed this activity!

Additional Information:

To experiment with virtual pendulums at home, check out:

http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/pendulum-lab/pendulum-lab_en.html

This video shows some of the cool patterns that a group of pendulum waves can make!  Do you know why the patterns were produced?  Try to figure it out using information you learned today in class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkdfJ9PkRQ

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