The Moving Man

The moving man was an experiment where the individual was able to click on a man and drag him back and forth across the screen in order to see where his position, acceleration, and velocity fell. To start off the experiment, the person doing the experiment could choose where he or she wanted him to start at and then that person could move him either forward, backward, or both ways for 20.0 seconds. When I first started the experiment the man was placed at zero meters so that is where I left him and then continued along with the experiment. I started to move him forward slowly and noticed that the acceleration graph moved twice as fast as the velocity graph which in return moved twice as fast as the position graph. I also observed that it if I was moving the man slow enough and going forward that acceleration showed up as negative which I thought was very odd. I always knew that if you move something backwards then the object will have negative acceleration but I did not know until the experiment that if an object moved slowly enough, acceleration would appear to be zero or negative. I also noticed that when the man is not moving, the acceleration, velocity, and position graphs all run straight across the screen until the man is in motion again. I found that no matter where I started the man on the position graph, the experiment was still very interesting to see how such small movements can affect position, velocity, and acceleration in such great amounts.