Motion and Design with Google Spreadsheet

Our current science curriculum is "Motion and Design" through the Einstein Project.  In this kit our students get hands on experience learning about how and why vehicles move the way they do.  We spend time learning about Newton's Three Laws of Motion as well.  

This year I have been trying to incorporate more Google Drive tools, especially when opportunities arise to use Google Spreadsheet.  In our most recent lesson, students had to learn how an unbalanced force effected their vehicles' movement.  In this case, the unbalanced force was washers.  At first, their vehicles did not move with small amounts of washers, but eventually, as you will see below, they got their vehicles moving very fast.  The faster their vehicles went in combination with the washers hitting the ground, made actually seeing inertia (vehicle moving without a force acting on it) possible.  

While students made these observations, they also collected data on a Google Spreadsheet.  The spreadsheets were simple, three column, designs.  With their data, students quickly created graphs showing their results with basically one click of a button.  This was a fun, simple, and quick way to collect and analyze data in our fifth grade classroom.