Pierce Khoury

Mrs. Goodwin

Physics

3/5/18

Mousetrap Racecar Write-Up

In this project Newtons laws 1 through 3 all had an affect on the mousetrap. For the first

law which is the law of inertia or the real definition of motion - sometimes referred to as the law

of inertia. Newton's first law of motion is often stated as. An object at rest stays at rest and an

object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon

by an unbalanced force. According to Newton's first law we think that the car will decrease in

speed when it goes on the unbalanced surface because of the force. The procedure I went through

was, went to a hallway, wound the back wheels up (turned it backwards on the axel), released the

tension, car went down the hallway 4 meters.

Newtons second of motion is force [F] is defined as the mass [m] of an object times the

acceleration [a]. Force is measured in newtons, mass is measured in kilograms, and gravity is

measured in meters per second per second. Simply put, Newton said that mass resists change, and

forces causes change. If you want to double the acceleration of an object, you can double the force

or cut the original mass in half. Energy was conserved by winding the string backwards on the axel

and the arm and axel was how much kinetic and how much possible potential energy it was going

to have. Both kinetic and potential energy where happening because it had potential because it was

trying to release tension and when it was released it had a speed which is kinetic.
 Newtons third is often called the law of action-reaction. In the most basic definition of a

force, it is a push or a pull. Newton recognized that a force was an interaction between two objects;

example, when you push on a wall, the wall pushes back on you, you and the wall are part of an

interacting together. When you apply a force to a wall the wall applies an equal force back as is

evidence by your bent fingers against the wall. Two simple machines that are within the mousetrap

car are lever for the arm and string to propel it forward and axel to hold the string. Also, 1st calss

lever was the lever used for the car. These simple machines influenced my design by making it

more of a distance over a force.

Overall, in the making of the mousetrap car I have learned that anyone needs a lot of

patience and imagination to create a car. One problem I ran into was that the string was to strong

and the base was to heavy for the car to move any farther than 4 meters. So I would make my base

smaller base and I thinner string.