Newton's law: acceleration as a function of mass with Cobra SMARTsense

Principle
The measuring carriage on the carriageway is uniformly accelerated by a mass which is connected to the carriage via a deflection roller with a thread and generates a force in the gravitational field. The concrete value of the acceleration is calculated from the tensile force and the accelerated mass from the 2nd Newtonian Axiom.
Benefits

• Especially understandable and didactically prepared description of the experiment (relevance to everyday life, etc.) including protocol questions.
• Future-oriented teaching: Integration into digital science lessons with tablets or smartphones.
• Increased motivation of students by using the intuitive measureAPP.
• Increased media competence.

Tasks

• Pupils accelerate a car with variable mass on a roadway with a constant train weight and measure the travel time the car needs for a distance of 50 cm. To do this, the pupils gradually increase the total accelerated mass (car mass + train mass) from 65 g to 185 g.
• The pupils evaluate the measured data and obtain a linear relationship between acceleration and accelerated mass, from which they determine the slope.

Learning Objectives
In this experiment, the students are to be led experimentally towards the simplified formulation of the 2nd Newtonian axiom.