Year 4 Science: Friction

Today, we investigated how different surfaces create different amounts of friction force. We tried to time how fast an object rolled down ramps, but we found the stopwatches and our reaction times didn’t give us reliable results. Therefore, we decided to film our experiments in iMovie on the iPads. When we played them back, we could slow down the recording to count the number of frames it took for the object to travel down the ramps. There are 25 frames in one second: the surface the objects rolled down fastest was the smooth wood (14 frames, so less friction) whereas the bumpy carpet was the slowest surface (23 frames, so more friction as it took more frames).