Measuring Motion

Hello, I am Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. The big idea today is that we can measure motion using sound waves. I have this nifty motion detector hooked up to my computer, and when I collect the data, this motion detector is going to send out sound waves. You may even hear it ticking, and those sound waves are going to bounce off my hand and back to the detector, and we get to compare what it looks like on our graph when I move my hand slowly compared to when I move my hand quickly. Motion. So now I am going to move my hand slowly, and we will see what the graph looks like. Slowly dragging my hand, I can hear the sound waves, and I have a graph. Now, let us see what happens when I move my hand faster. My hand is moving more quickly. Take a look at my graph, and we have another graph. Now, there are so many things we could talk about with this graph, but we are going to keep it simple. You will notice with my red line, when I moved my hand slowly, my line went up slowly. The blue line, when I moved my hand faster, my line went up faster. Real-time data collection. This little motion detector is called GoMotion from a company called Vernier, and it is a great affordable way to get real-time data collection and hands-on science into your classroom. If you would like to learn more, we have linked to the GoMotion sensor and other motion interactives in our video description. Thanks for watching.