AP Physics 1 students completed a difficult but practical marble launcher lab on Tuesday, Oct.7.

The lab consisted of several different portions.  Students had to experiment to figure out velocity values and had to perform multiple trials in order to calculate other important values.  Finally, AP Physics 1 teacher Dr. Benjamin Ayida would give students an angle, and using that, students had to predict where it the marble would land.

“In our lab, we predicted the horizontal displacement of a marble launched at a certain height and angle from a marble launcher,” Surya Rangineni ‘16 explained.  “The lab provided a real world application of physics, and we got to put our kinematic equations into practice.”

A few groups could be seen struggling because they had thought they knew what to do, but when time came to perform the final experiment, sounds of frustration were heard across the hall.

“Our group had gotten the correct answer based on a lot of tries, but when Dr. Ayida gave us our final values to test, we were totally off,” Seema Iyengar ‘16 said.

Regardless, students continued to look at the lab positively because as Jack Zeitz ‘16 explained, the lab was practical.

“Not only were we able to utilize the knowledge we learned in physics, but we were also able to see its tangible result,” Zeitz said.  “This kind of knowledge is very useful in life in that it allows us to further understand…why [certain processes] occur.”