Hovercraft Lab Excitement!!

Today, in class, we conducted a lab using a hovercraft to display Newton's 1st law and demonstrate inertia. In this lab we got to physically ride a hovercraft around the gym- it was so cool!

Riding the hovercraft was very different than I had expected. I had to balance out my weight and scrunch myself into the middle of the seating pad at the same time. This required some interesting leg positioning as well as awkward leaning forward to stabilize the craft. That was another thing that surprised me; I had expected the hovercraft to be stable when I was sitting on it but in actuality, it was very prone to leaning and tilting. Looking back, this is very reasonable and I probably should have expected this. It felt like I had been shrunk and was riding around on an air-hockey puck. I say this because the hovercraft encountered no surface friction (as it was not in contact with the ground like other vehicles). It rode smoothly and did not slow down at all as I glided across the gym floor. That was a little weird to experience and the best thing I can think to compare it to is the way in which an air-hockey puck glides smoothly across the air-hockey table. The puck glides smoothly because, like the hovercraft, it has air blasting it up from the table's surface to decrease the amount of friction that would otherwise slow the puck down. Riding the hovercraft was different than skiing or riding a scooter. Surface friction from the ground causes both of those things to slow down and you must exert your own force on them in order to continue your motion. Once the hover craft is in motion, no outside force is acting upon it so it remains in motion at a constant velocity until stopped - just as Newton's First Law describes. Skiing or scootering, you would encounter an outside force that would interfere with the object's tendency to remain in motion.

This lab taught us that inertia is directly related to mass. The heavier riders were harder to stop than the lighter riders on the hovercraft. This is because the more mass, the more inertia there is for a particular item. I learned that net force is the total force that act upon an object. When these forces are balanced out (opposite forces are equal), the net force equals zero; thus there would be no net force. Equilibrium occurs when these opposite forces are balanced out. For example, when the hover craft was gliding, it was not being acted upon by any outside forces yet it was moving forward at a constant velocity due to it's tendency to stay in motion. At this point it was not accelerating or decelerating and it was in an uninterrupted state of motion. This would be equilibrium. This is also the point at which one could expect to be moving at a constant velocity, according to the data gathered in this lab.
Also based on this lab, acceleration seems to depend on the force acted upon the object in rest to put it in motion. The stronger the force, the greater the rate of acceleration should be.

This was a fun inertia activity and it definitely helped me to understand how an object can move even when force is not acting upon it constantly.