Spreadsheet Game

The first part of this game is to give you some practice building a spreadsheet. The second part will be some physics.

1. Integers from zero to ten
2. Take the square of the number in column 1
3. Multiply the value in column 2 by 5
4. Multiply the value in column 1 by 50
5. Subtract column 3 from column 4

In the above story, a project was fired straight up at velocity of 50 units per second. In the absence of gravity, that projectile would have added 50 units to its position every second. Now, if someone drops an object, the calculation would show how far the object has dropped as a function of time; the value for ‘a’ is negative since the acceleration is downward. If you check all the numbers, you will see that we are adding these two different stories together to get the result for an object fired upwards at 50 units per second that is subject to the downward acceleration of ‘a’.

The equation below has those two terms and it has one more to account for the possibility that you didn’t shot the object from y=0.

You might recognize this as being an equation from Kinematics.

There is an idea called Superposition. For linear systems, if two things are at work, the result will be the sum of their individual effects. In this case, the individual effects are upward motion caused when you fired the projectile and downward motion caused by the acceleration of gravity.

Appendix A

It is typical when using a spreadsheet for a calculation, that your first column involves counting integers and you have the option of starting at 0 or 1.

In our opinion, something just repetitious preserves Federation in its own right. We would direct you to the examination of Series calculations, which have an index running from 1 to a number or from 1 to Infinity. Can you think of other areas of math used in science, where this idea ‘indexing’ surfaces?