Rocket Hot Wheels Car

My honors physics class decideed to put a model rocket on a Hot wheels/MatchBox car. We wanted to do this because we wanted to find out the acceleration, and speed/velocity of a hot wheels/Matchbox car with a rocket on them.

Materials:
Matchbox/Hot wheels car
4.8 Meter long piece of wood
Model rocket engine
Wire
Estes Model rocket
Vernier Photgateses (5)
Outside of a plastic pen (2)

Building the Car

Now that you have your hot wheel car, hot glue, super glue, or gorilla glue the model rocket on top of the hot wheels car. Make sure the rocket on the car is parallel to the ground and is safely secure on the car. If the rocket is not glued on straight, the car when lighted will not go straight.
Now cut the pen tubes in half, and make each half the legnth of the rocket. You want to cut the top part of the pen off so the wires will be able to go throughthe pen tubes. Hot glue the pen pieces to the sides of the rocket. You also want the pen tubes parallel to the hot wheel car.
Now, You want a straw or another pen tube. This serves the purpose of breaking the laser beams of the vernier photogates. Glue the straw or pen tube to the top of the rocket. Make it perpendicular to the rocket. It should be standing up right and securely on it or else the photogates will not catch the data.
The weight of our car was 66 grams
This also has to do with Newton's second law. it states that the accerleration of an object is proportioanal to the net force and inversely proportioal to the mass of the object being acceleraed

Building the Track

Take the 4.8 meter long track and put a small piece of metal at each end. Drill 2 holes on the sides so that the hot wheels car can fit between them. You are going to run 1 wire through each hole as long as the track so the car wont go off the track. Mark 10 cm from one of the metal pieces. You are going to put a photogate there. From the 10cm mark, then the 1 meter mark. and put another photogate there. Repeat meter after meter until the 4 meter mark. With all each having the same amout of distanct betcween each photogate

Setting It All Up

When putting on the fuse to the rocket, you dont want the 2 wires touching.
Beore you do anything else check all the photogates and make sure they are working properly.
now all you have to do is put the car on the track. When you wrap the wire around the metal part at beore you do anything else check all the photogates and make sure they are working properly. The beinging of yor track, make sure it is not too tight or else the car will not go anywhere. Right before you let the car go off click on the vernier photogate softwere and make sure it is recording then light the rocket.

Concusion:
We did our experiment a couple different times. The first time the track was a little different. So when the car was launched the wire kept moving up and down while hitting the photogate so our group got 42 different data points. Intead of just 5. Then we went back and made some modifications to the track and to our cars. The second time we did it, the car was going too fast for the photogates so the data didnt collect. but if our data did collect we would find:
acceleration by (Final Velocity-Inital velociy) divided by (Final Time-Inital Time)
Instantaneous speed by Distance divided by time
Average Speed by (Final Distance-Initial Distance) divided by (Final Time-Inital Time)
Dispacement by the change in position having both magnitude and direction is equal to the final position minus the initial position