Clothes peg
Hit the target
Anna and her friends are playing a game during her birthday party. If you hit 100 points on the target, you will win a sweet candy. You can use a small gun made of a clothes peg and you must wet a earbuds to a colorated water and then shoot at the target.
What can we learn about when conducting this activity?
Ideas for experiments:
How far do we have to place the target so that all the children hit the target?
At what height should the target and gun be placed so that the bullets hit the target, if we shoot upright to the target?
At what angle is it best to hit the target (if the gun and target are placed at the same height)?
The Physics in this activity
This experiment illustrates the trajectory of an object thrown near the Earth´s surface that is influenced only by the force of gravity. This curved path that the object is moving along, was demonstrated and described by Galileo as a parabola. In this case, all the other factors (air, wind, changing acceleration at higher altitudes) that can influence its motion, are neglected. However, if we take into account the air drag force, the trajectory of the object motion differs from parabola. The path that the object moves along in this case is called ballistic curve.
