Finding Acceleration — Badminton School

How to measure acceleration

It is possible to find the acceleration of a falling object experimentally by measuring the average velocity.

Once we have an average velocity, we can use the equation:

average velocity = (initial velocity = final velocity)÷2

We know that the initial velocity was zero so this will allow us to calculate the final velocity.

We now have the initial velocity (zero), the final velocity and the time taken. This allows us to calculate the acceleration.

a v e r a g e v e l o c i t y = \frac{v - u}{t}