We started today with rotational energy. We talked yesterday about how a Tic Tac can bounce higher on the second bounce than the first, but today we wanted to see the conservation of energy in another situation. We did lots of trials of things going down ramps--cars, spheres, disks, rings, and hover pucks. Some of us didn't believe that one of the PASCO cars and a hover puck would go down the ramp with the same motion, but a quick test (see above) showed us that we can ignore the rotational energy in the wheels of one of those cars. All spheres went down the ramp with the same motion, but how did spheres and cars compare? That was a HUGE debate. We drew an LOL diagram for objects going down ramps and tried to, with our definitions of translational and rotational kinetic energies, to explain what happened in lab.