Thursday, December 27, 2007

Nate's first experiment


For Christmas my six year old Nate got a Thomas and Percy and carnival track set and he wanted to run an experiment to see what was the fastest train on the track.

So Nate picked out fourteen different trains and had them in three different categories (tank engine, tender engine, diesel engine) then we ran each engine down the track three different times and I recorded the time it took and how far it went down the track. We had to throw out three of the trains because they were too wide or bulky for the track. After we got the information I plugged it into a spreadsheet to get the speed for each train and gave that to Nate. He was very thrilled with the results.

FYI on the Thomas and Percy carnival set Percy is the fastest followed by Thomas. Harry the Diesel and Molly the Tender engines were the slowest.

I am so proud of my little man for running this experiment. My only suggestion was to run the trains three different times to get good data. I recorded the data and ran the stopwatch but he did everything.