The Field Log is open to a fresh page, and Rocket is tapping his pencil. "Twelve weeks of numbers. Where do I start?"
Raven lays out the pad, the ball, the car and the tape measure in a row. "Start with the question. Then show the data."
"What do you notice about every Field Lab we did?" she asks. "Question, plan, data, explanation. Same shape every time."
Nova hovers over the page. "A report is the same shape," she says. "Tell the reader what you did and what the numbers say."
Rocket writes a title at the top and underlines it twice. "Landing Pad: Can a Soft Stop Beat a Hard Floor?"
"Good question," Raven says. "Now answer it with evidence."
A report tells someone who was not there what you asked, what you did, what you measured and what it means.
Keep it short and honest. Numbers you measured, criteria you met or missed, and the physics that explains the result.
| Section | What goes in it | From which day |
|---|---|---|
| Question | the design problem in one sentence | Monday |
| Criteria and constraints | your measurable goals and your limits | Monday |
| Fair test plan | what was fixed, what changed, how many trials | Tuesday |
| Data | your baseline, prototype and iteration tables | Wednesday and Thursday |
| The physics | the force pair, the longer stop, where the energy went | weeks 6, 8, 9 and 12 |
| Result and next step | which criteria you met, and the next change you would try | Thursday |
Three ideas explain your pad. First, the force pair: the pad pushes the ball exactly as hard as the ball pushes the pad.
Second, time: a physics text says the effect of a force depends on how long it acts. Padding makes the stop longer and the push gentler.
Third, energy. The standards say that when an object's motion energy changes, some other change in energy happens at the same time.
Your ball lost motion energy into the pad as warmth and sound. That is why it barely bounced.
Use the units from NIST: centimetres or metres for distance, seconds for time. Name them every time you write a number.
Your report sits on top of a whole course. Before you write, look back at where the ideas came from.
| Course review | True or false? |
|---|---|
| Speed is distance divided by time. | ? |
| Kinetic energy grows with mass and with the square of speed. | ? |
| Gravitational forces can push objects apart. | ? |
| The two forces in a pair act on different objects. | ? |
| A good report lists criteria that were missed as well as those that were met. | ? |
A real report, physicist. Tomorrow is Game Day: your family reviews the design and helps you test one more change.