Week 4 Pre-Workshop Activity

Feb.21 - Feb. 24

We continue to be pleased by your work in the tutorial. It seems that you are starting to understand more about forces, free-body diagrams, and how to apply Newton's 2nd and 3rd Laws.

BE SURE TO WATCH THE VIDEO BEFORE YOU COME TO THE WORKSHOP

This week.'s pre-workshop activity may be more challenging than most. We are giving you a problem based on this week's lab experiment, but we are asking you to do a rather thorough error analysis. This calculation is one that scientists and engineers often do to truly understand the errors and uncertainties in their measured data. The basis of the error analysis is given in Appendix D. Because we have given you a previous problem on error analysis, this will not be new material for you. We encourage you to use Excel and/or your calculators to find the averages and standard deviations, because this is what you will do in real life. For the TI-83 (and probably other TI calculators) use the 1-VAR STAT and choose sigmax, not Sx, for the standard deviation.

Please do not wait until the last moment to do this activity. It may take you longer than you think to go through it.

This pre-workshop activity is now on WebAssign. You may access it at http://webassign.net/

This activity must be submitted to WebAssign 30 minutes before your workshop begins (Monday sections have extension).

Note that WebAssign sometimes is down unexpectedly. Do not wait until the last minute to do this activity.