Physics: Friction: Your Friend or Your Enemy?

Objectives

• Students will determine what factors affect the friction between two surfaces.
• Students will relate the forces needed to drag different shoes across a table at a constant speed.
• Students will develop an understanding of the forces needed to start the motion of shoes with different soles.

Vocabulary

• acceleration
• force
• kinetic friction
• mass
• Newton’s Laws
• static friction

About the Lesson

This lesson simulates the static and kinetic friction of different shoes being dragged across an inclined plane.
As a result, students will:

• Manipulate values for force in different situations.
• Measure static and kinetic friction data.
• Determine the coefficients of static and kinetic friction.
• Apply Newton’s Laws to solve problems.