Measuring speed in the laboratory

In this lesson

Describe a laboratory method for measuring the speed of a moving object, naming the piece of equipment used for each measurement the method needs.

What it covers

• Every speed measurement needs exactly two readings: a distance and a time - name them first, then choose the equipment
• The ruler-and-stopwatch method: what you measure, where you measure from and to, who starts the clock, and where the error gets in
• The light gate method: that the gate times the interruption of a beam, that the DISTANCE is the length of the card that broke the beam, and that the human is removed from the timing
• Naming the instrument for every single measurement, explicitly, in the written answer - the measurement, then the instrument, every line
• Calculating the speed from the two readings, converting a card measured in centimetres and a time measured in milliseconds before substituting
• Repeating the run and taking a mean, and doing it as a worked step rather than mentioning it
• Checking at the end that the method actually produces the quantity that was asked for

Key words

On the specification