Ion Turtle's Blog-O-Science: Acceleration

Hey Ion_Turtle is back. This time to talk about acceleration. Acceleration is the change in velocity divided by the change in time. If you speed up or slow down your accelerating (yes even slowing down)

This Bugatti has the world record top speed at 409km/h. You have to accelerate a lot to get that high

To acceleration can be positive or negative. Positive goes the same way as the motion and speeds you up. Negative goes the opposite direction and slows you down. Negative acceleration is still acceleration. To accelerate you can speed up (pedal on your bicycle), slow down (hit the brakes in your car), or turn (which slows you down a little).

To calculate acceleration you take the final speed subtract the initial speed and divide by the time it took. Or a=Fs-Is/T

Acceleration can also be graphed. If you look at a graph of acceleration it will have line that goes up and down and sometimes stays horizontal. If it is going up then the object has a positive acceleration. The steeper the line the faster it is accelerating. If the line is horizontal then the object has a constant speed and is not accelerating. If the line goes down it has negative acceleration. Again the steeper the line the faster is is accelerating (because it is accelerating backward the faster the acceleration the sooner the object will stop)