Friction Lab

This very simple first year lab serves to remind students how to calculate friction coefficient, and have them gather data needed to calculate friction coefficient. One measures the critical 'slip' angle of a surface needed before a sample will slide down the board.

This is done for a set of materials that will be used in a build-project.

Collaboration is used to as a motivator for each group gathering their data, and feeding it into a central dataset.

Only with a large amount of data can you be sure of getting a good representation of each materials behaviour - and only through collaborating as a cohort, can the students gain this significant dataset.

The result of this collaboration is a large and rich dataset, providing a scatter which students can then use to determine which values for friction coefficient to use in their following build-projects.

This also serves as a good visual prompt to talk to students about experimental variability, and experimental errors/uncertainty.