mousetrap cars and vehicles

Print and pass out to your students
The Experiment Guide download is designed to teach students the secrets of building a winning mouse-trap-powered racer. Through each activity, students will learn all about the many variables that affect one and another and how they relate to the performance of a mousetrap vehicle. Over 69 pages of high-level activities and handouts that can be printed and passed out to students for an advance study of the science behind building a record setting mousetrap powered racer. The Activities are the same as those found in The Secrets to Success but they come ready to print and pass out to your students. The activities are written for high school level students and beyond. Download a sample now




Tons of Activities, Formulas, Excel Sheets
Experiments include: Graphing velocity vs. time, acceleration vs. time, finding potential energy, finding spring constant, predicting maximum travel distance, power output, the mechanical advantage, rolling friction, coefficient of friction, rotational inertia, efficiency, and MORE MORE MORE!

Excel Sheets: The included Excel sheets are designed to go along with the activities in the Printable Guide so that students can record and organize their data as they do each experiment. Each Excel file is a small software program that produces a variety of graphs and performs a ton of calculations based on simple measurements taken from a students mousetrap vehicle project. For example, based on measurements of mass, wheel diameter, lever arm length, spring constant, and several other measurements, the Excel sheets can produce graphs of distance vs. Time, speed vs. time, acceleration vs. time and many other such graphs. This powerful program will also calculate the vehicle's total starting energy, the coefficient of friction, the starting torque, the power output, and the total number of wheel rotations. Sample data is included for comparison between results.



Other topics included:
Motion: acceleration, velocity, displacement
Friction: surface friction, fluid friction, reducing friction.
Wheels: tire traction
Newtons Laws: inertia, F=MA, action reaction
Momentum:
Center of mass: weight distribution.
Rotational inertia:
Hooks Law: starting torque, spring constant.
Energy: potential and kinetic energy, power output
Mechanical advantage: transmission, wheel-to-axle ratio,
Torque:
More, more, and MORE!