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Heavy Loads: Testing Force and Mass With Cargo Trailer Carts

Grade 8 physical science: analyze cart investigations to show how net force and mass change motion, then apply the results to safe cargo bike trailers.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-PS2-2

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
11 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 8
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students analyze data to describe how a change in motion depends on net force and on mass.
Students plan a fair investigation that changes one variable at a time.

How to use

Read the project notes together and have students label the variables in each test before they start. Encourage them to look for doubling and halving patterns in the tables.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-PS2-2

Plan investigations showing that an object's change in motion depends on the net force on it and its mass.

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Heavy Loads: Testing Force and Mass With Cargo Trailer Carts

Plan and analyze cart tests to see how net force and mass change motion.

The cart tests

Read the project notes and study both tables. Then answer the questions.

Bike Safety Project: Cargo Trailers

1Many families in Eastbrook pull cargo trailers behind their bikes to carry groceries, gear or small children. Students in Ms. Folasade Adeyemi's eighth-grade class noticed that a loaded trailer seems much harder to get moving and much harder to stop than an empty one. For their bike safety project, they decided to measure how the force on an object and the object's mass affect how quickly its speed changes.

2A real bike trailer is hard to test in a classroom, so the class used a model. A lab cart stood in for the trailer, and metal blocks stood in for the cargo. The cart rolled on a smooth, level track with low-friction wheels, so friction was small enough to ignore. A student pulled the cart forward with a spring scale, keeping the scale's reading steady for the whole run, so the reading was the net force on the cart. A motion sensor at the end of the track measured the cart's speed. Every run started from rest, so the speed after 1.0 s was also the change in speed during that second. Before each set of runs, the students checked that the track was level by setting a cart on it and making sure it stayed still, and they used a balance to measure the total mass of the cart and blocks.

3In Test A, the class kept the total mass of the cart and its blocks at 1.0 kg and changed the pulling force. In Test B, they kept the pulling force at 1.2 N and changed the total mass by adding blocks. Each run was repeated three times, and the tables show the averages. One group's three trials for the 1.5 N run in Test A were 1.4 m/s, 1.6 m/s and 1.5 m/s.

4Before the next class, student Rafael Okonkwo asked a new question: what happens when two forces act on the cart in opposite directions? He attached a felt pad that rubbed on the track and pushed back on the cart. When he pulled the moving cart forward with exactly the same force that the felt pushed back, the cart kept rolling at 0.8 m/s from one end of the sensor's range to the other.