In class on wednesday, we got the opportunity to ride on a hovercraft. Riding on a hovercraft feels much different than riding on a plane or a boat. The hovercraft is uncontrollable, no forces are acting on it but the person pushing you across the gym. Basically, you are literally just floating without any control of your direction. Riding on, for example, a sled, is much different than riding on a hovercraft because in a sled you have control of how fast you are going or the general direction that you want to glide down the hill. In a hovercraft, you really are able to understand the feeling of being an object in motion staying in motion. A sled stops at the bottom of the hill because you were the force that caused it to go down in the first place. A hovercraft never stops unless another person or force causes it to.
I learned that the more mass one person has the harder it will be to be the force that stops them. I also learned that because of the pull of gravity and a thing called support force, an object has the ability to be moving with a net force of zero. The last thing I learned was that an object can be in equilibrium when the forces are positive and negative and equal causing it to have a net force of zero.
Acceleration, based on this lab, seems to depend on the amount of force an object is given and also its mass. The bigger the person on the hovercraft, the harder one had to push to make them go the same speed as a smaller person.
I would expect to have constant velocity when I pushed off on ice skates and glided there down the ice. Or, as we discussed in class, when I am skydiving and I reach a certain speed and then the support force matches the pull of gravity; causing me to fall at a constant rate.
Some members where harder to stop than others because some members had more mass than others. The more mass, the more force was needed to stop them.
I liked how you gave good comparative examples with the sled and ice-skating, where I mentioned skate boarding. Those are two good examples. You mentioned how the hovercraft doesn't stop unless a force acts on it, and how the sled eventually stops. I think you could have gone a little more into talking about the friction with the sled. But everything else was good. We both talked about it was harder to stop the heavier person rather than the lighter person.
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