Reaction Time
Objective: To determine reaction time and to access the accuracy of the measured time.
Equipment: Timer, pencil or pen, meter stick, coffee filter, and metal ball
Discussion: The significance of this experiment is to help us measure and understand our reaction time. Reaction time is the amount of time between something happening and you responding to it. We also did some free fall experiments with a ruler, a coffee filter, and a steel ball. This means that we dropped objects from a resting position that has nothing attached to it is only under the influence of gravity. Since we have a few seconds delay starting and stopping a timer after the object has begun to drop and after it hits the floor we used the measurements …show more content…

There is no real solution for this except that we could practice trying to improve our reaction time. Another error could be if we drop it from different heights each time. The higher we drop the ball from causes it to take longer to hit the floor and vice versa if we drop it from a lower height it would take a shorter time to hit the floor. We could try to make sure that we do our best to drop the ball from the same location each time. Then you have air friction which does not allow the objects to fall in a straight line causing them to bump into the people standing in the area and causing it to take a longer time to come to a rest. You can’t get rid of air friction, but you can try to minimize it. The ball’s rotational inertia could play a small role on error percentage. Also you have air The time accuracy of the coffee filter and metal ball was good because the average deviation was fairly low. The coffee filter had an average deviation of +/-.463 which is ok because about 60% of the drops fell between the 1st deviation. The metal ball had an average deviation of +/-.076 and about 70% of the numbers fell between the 1st deviation. So I would take the times to be in the ball park they should be in for the objects falling. There was a 3 % error due to all that factors that might have played apart on the falling speed