my name is Tom gazda I teach and applied
physics class in high school to 12th
graders and one of the things that we do
every year I have this lab called the Brad
lab named after this kid Brad. It's
basically measuring our school.
It's like a rectangular shape around the
inside of the school. How far around is
it around the this this area in the
school I want students to measure it
with ways that don't involve traditional
using a tape measure so come up with
different ways one of the ways that was
suggested this year because we had
previously learned the what the speed of
sound was which is 761 miles per hour
one of our students Alex suggested that
we use this be the sound to measure the
distance and after we would do that kind
of shell but after we were done with the
other methods we kinda went back and
looked at using the speed of sound
the ability to record slow motion which
is now on most people's phones you have
an iphone you can record 240 frames per
second the motion so using that has
really gave us the ability to look at
the difference in the speed of sound as
travels throughout the hall so we've got
a bunch of trials and we've troubleshoot
along the way it's been a great process
and I think we have pretty good data
pretty good measurement but it turns out
that every time we calculated were off
by so much close to twenty percent and
where we're still working hard on trying
to figure out why that is so put this
video together to try to show people
what we were doing
one of the things we thought was the
source of our trouble was when you clap
the blocks together when exactly do they
come together what exactly is the sound
created and it gets hard to tell when
especially really slow it down so we we
were brainstorming some ideas of how to
use other methods that may be more clear
when the sounds created we have a few
ideas the one that we tried and have a
video of them gonna show is popping a
balloon i'm going to show this now
so we've been really brainstormed a lot
about this we do a lot of good
problem-solving really proud of the
class in general you know a problem
solve real problem solving is not
something that you get to do in high
school because talking about we don't
really get to do it and we've done it in
this class and the kids have been great
so I'm really excited about that but
where you were dedicated and i know i'm
particularly dedicated to try to really
get this close to really get a slow
measurement error so because I think we
should be able to so we reach out the
assignment here is for have students
help us reach out to some experts who
maybe can push in the right direction or
at least can maybe suggest what our
source of error is so that we can then
try to problem-solve to to account for
that and to and to reduce that so thanks
for your time really appreciate it