Using Our Technology (NXT and MacBook) For Experiments In Physics

One of the things that I’m studying and learning about in Physics at the moment is acceleration. There are experiments that I’m needing to do that when my dad first looked at them thought we wouldn’t be able to do, but I mentioned this. For my birthday I got a NXT Acceleration sensor that is meant to measure the acceleration of an NXT bot. We realized that we could use that for a method of sensing the acceleration of an object (I’d have to attach the sensor to the object). Then, in the middle of the lesson, my dad realized that he had one all along. All the MacBooks and MacBook Pros have a Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) built-in, an acceleration sensor. So with the help of SiesMac (a tool that provides the user with a set of graphs {X, Y, and Z axis} that allow him or her to see the motion that the mac is sensing) we could use his laptop as a sensor. Between these two sensor options we now know that we have a good set of tools to use for these experiments.