I am a very hands on person when it comes to school so being able to build a robot that we were going to apply the equations we learned to was an easy way for me to learn.
There were three equations we had to use during this experiment, they were:
number of wheel turns= X degrees over 360degrees/1 turn
Distance Traveled: d= (number of turns) X (circumference)
Average Velocity: v= distance (meters)/time (seconds)
we were given a chart that would calculate everything we needed when the robot actually moved however we needed to put in power and seconds first. So the first Power we put in was 75, we pressed go and the robot moved across the table and instantly gave us statistics on the three equations we needed to calculate. Although it gave us all the information my group and i decided to do all of the matt out to double check that it was right. So for the 75 power i got 4.6 for the number of turns, the distance traveled was 0.79442 and the average velocity was 0.26480667
Next we used power 50 and for each time we kept the same time which was 3 seconds; for the number of turns we got 2.92778, distance traveled was 0.505627 and average velocity was 0.168542
the 3rd time we took statistics was for power being 25, number of wheel turns was 1.16667, distance traveled was 0.201483 and average velocity was 0.067161
i realize that its a lot of numbers i just threw at you however was i learned from this was that the lesser the amount of power, the lesser the number of wheel turns. Also, the distance traveled is less too because if you dont have as many wheel turns, the robot will travel a shorter distance. Finally, the velocity decreases as well because the lesser the power the lesser the velocity(it will travel at a slower speed).
I love doing hands on activites because it allows me to see exactly how things work and how to calculate things. I wish we could have done more things with the robots like maybe to see how far it traveled in comparison to another robot or perhaps from one wall of the room to the other or in a circle etc.