ADAPT Program: Lesson Plans
Document Type
Learning Object
Date of this Version
1988
Abstract
Your task will be to collect data from a variety of physical systems and find the relationships between the manipulated (independent) and responding (dependent) variables using a graphical method. You now know two different ways of analyzing data using two different graphs, either Cartesian or log-log. It will be up to you to decide which to use. Remember: contrastive features, range of variation, and distribution in larger contexts are all necessary to be able to understand something. In physics language that means explore as wide a range of the manipulated variables as seems reasonable. In fact, every physical system is linear if you take a narrow range of values. Thus, to insure that your analysis is appropriate, be sure you double or triple, etc. the values you select for your manipulated variables.