What is your own motion project?

You have worked so hard for the first 3 weeks of 4AL.   You have mastered three key ingredients, step by step.
  1. How to design your own experiment from scratch to observe motions, based on modern technology --  Arduino.
  2. How to analyze motions by modern programing language -- Python. 
  3. How to apply fundamental physics laws such as Newton's law, and predict motion as a function of time. 
Now is a good time to design your own experiment, and apply your working knowledge above.  Roughly speaking,  we can think of four directions.
  1. Air Tack based projects
  2. Vertical Mass-spring projects
  3. Robot car based projects
  4. Human body motion projection
Please come up with your own creative, innovative project, and try to prove that your predictions agree with observations.
You are going to make an oral presentation during Week 10.

Examples of Possible Projects

  1. Air Track based projects:
    1. Inclined  slope -  Energy loss by friction and collision
    2. 2 masses + 3 springs:   Observation of two eigenstates and coupled oscillation
    3. Forced oscillation of a mass-spring system (driven by a stepping motor at the resonant frequency) 
    4. Momentum conservation by colliding two air tracks (with various mass/velocity). 
  2. Vertical Mass-spring projects
    1. A simple mass-spring system, but start from at any initial position and velocity. 
    2. Connect two masses vertically by springs (like spring-mass-spring-mass).  Observation of two eigenstates and coupled oscillation
    3. Two pendulum, connected by a horizontal spring. Observation of two eigenstates and coupled oscillation
  3. Robot Car based projects:
    1. Complex 2D motion (including rotation) observed by a 3-axis accelerometer / gyroscope 
    2. Translation of acceleration of a hand-held Arduino box to a robot car
    3. Remote sensing by additional sensors (temperature ....) on a robot car
    4. Automatic breaks for avoiding collisions 
  4. Human Body motion projects:
    1. Attach an Arduino box to a body / hand / leg -- Observe motion / acceleration. 
    2. Analyze motion of favorite sports by video recording / Tracker

 Good Examples of Presentations (from Session A)

Here are several good examples of the oral presentations from the Summer 2019 Session A.
  1. Inclined slope and collision/friction​
  2. ​Horizontal Mass-Spring System
  3. Coupled oscillation by two masses + 3 springs​
  4. Driven mass-spring at resonance
  5. Rotation of a robot car
  6. Harmonic Oscillation of a Robot Car
  7. ​Predicting position of a Robot Car by Acceleration

Arduino Robot Car

For your own project, you are welcome to utilize a given robot car, controlled by Arduino via Wifi.  12 robot cars were assembled by students in Summer Session A already.  So you can just take advantage of assembled cars.
More information can be found at

Project slides and Proposal

​The project proposal is due on gradescope. Upload a PDF that contains an
  • introduction section
  • materials required for your project
  • physics prediction and analysis
  • timeline for your project
​Have a brief writeup (few sentences) for each section.

Oral Presentations

You are going to make an oral presentation on Week 10.
Please post your google Slides by the midnight before your presentation day below, under the appropriate lab session.  Please read the instruction below to prepare your presentation file.
  • Each group will have 12 minutes for presentation, followed by 3 minutes of Q&A.
  • The file name of your Google slide should be like
    • ​Table#_ShortTitle.gslide
    • ​For example:   Table3_Momentum_Conservation.glide
  • The front page should include
    • Title
    • Your Names and Majors
    • Picture of your group (with names on top of picture)
  • Then the remaining structure should be like the template. 
    1. Introduction, overview of experimental setup
    2. Theory and prediction
    3. Experimental setup (picture, conceptual drawing)
    4. A video of running experiment
    5. Data taking and analysis methods
    6. Result 1
    7. Result 2
    8. ...
    9. Discussion 
    10. Conclusions and Future prospects
  • Make sure that the link to your video is working (from any computer).   You may have to copy your video file into the same folder.

Final Report

The final report is due on Mar 20th, 11 59 pm.
  • You are welcome to share the data and analysis with your group members.
  • However you must submit your own report.
  • Please describe your own contributions. 
  • Please use MS Word or Google Docs (or equivalent), single-space is OK.
  • Convert it to PDF file, and upload to GradeScope. 
Sept. 27, 2024 by Javier Carmona