Planning

Trolley Design:
(developing ideas)

Script

For this assessment task I chose to make a shopping trolley and here it is. Newtons first law,
also known as the law of inertia, is: “An object will remain at rest, or will not change its
speed or direction, unless it is acted upon by an unbalanced force.” As you can see here my
shopping trolly is completely still when there is no force being applied to it. I am not
touching the trolley and therefore it is still and not changing speed or direction. Also, all the
objects in the trolley are still. When we move the trolley and bring it to a sudden stop as you
can see here, the law of inertia applies as the object continues to move in the same straight
direction at a constant speed when there is no unbalanced force causing this reaction. An
example of this in real life is when you are driving a car at a very high speed and then you hit
something like a wall or a tree this causes the car to then suddenly stop but the passengers,
you and any object in the car will continue to move in that same direction and speed. This is
why airbags and seatbelts are crucial and protect you from severe injuries.
Newtons second law is: “The size of an object’s acceleration depends directly on the size of
the net force acting on it and is inversely proportional to its mass.” Net force is basically the
vector sum of all the forces that act upon an object. These 2 forces usually are going in
opposite direction that are equal in magnitude, which means that these two forces cancel
each other, and the object remains at rest as there are no remaining unbalanced forces
acting upon it. When forces are unbalanced the net force ends up in an acceleration,
whether that force was internal or external. The formula for Newton’s second law is: F=ma,
f standing for force, m standing for mass and a standing for acceleration. You can rearrange
this equation to find the force, mass or acceleration depending on what you need to find. As
you can see here this trolley demonstrates this law as according to Newton’s Second Law if I
apply an unbalanced force on the trolley (which has a constant mass), the car would
accelerate further. Hence if the mass is increased and the force applied is the same, the
trolley would not accelerate as far as the one in the previous example. If I were to increase
the mass of the trolley, there will be a greater force required to ensure the trolley is
accelerating at the same rate as a trolley with less mass. A real-life example, that is similar
to this instance is when you are pushing a shopping cart, when the shopping cart is empty it
requires less force to push at the same speed than a cart that is full. This simply means that
the more mass the more force required to achieve the same acceleration.

The Third and Final Newton Law states that’s “for every action (force) in nature there is an
equal and opposite reaction.” This statement is easily justified as when I push the trolley in
the video, there is an equal force exerted back onto my hand. The net force was 0 since the
forces were equal and opposite and when I started moving the trolley, I added an
unbalanced force, after moving it with my hand (at contact point) an equal force is then
exerted back towards my hand. An example of this in real life is when you blow up a balloon
and release it the same air you blew rushes out of the balloon.

Showing Self-Management Skills:

My calendar
 Reflection

Evaluating:

Essentially for this assessment I was planning on making a car but when I tried making it, it
didn’t work very well. This led me to attempt something new and I decided to do make a
trolley. I enjoyed doing this task because it required me to think creatively and not only
follow the design cycle but link my design technology knowledge with my science
knowledge. One thing I think I can improve on is my model, as my first model didn’t work, I
would’ve wanted to spend more time on my model and perfect it as I believe I could’ve
made something better, but I was short on time. This goes back to my time-management
skills as I had too many assessments and I clearly didn’t allocate enough time to spend on
this one. One thing I think I did well is incorporating real life examples in my assessment and
using good scientific vocabulary.