Ticker Tapes & Acceleration

Thornridge High School

Ticker Tape and Acceleration

Students in Mr. Sievers physics classes at Thornridge High School used “newly” acquired ticker tape devices to study the behavior of an object moving at constant velocity and an object accelerating. The ticker tape device uses a moving arm and carbon paper disk to record dots on the ticker tape. It records 60 dots per second on a moving tape. Therefore, the dots reflect the motion of the object over some time period and students could construct a position-time graph and a velocity-time graph for each object from the ticker tape information. Since there were 2 objects, this meant students constructed 4 graphs. This was a graphing-mania lab.