Pinewood Derby Physics Booklet Description

The booklet named Pinewood Derby Car Design and the Virtual Race is written especially for the youngster. The key to being able to use the powerful Virtual Race program to design and fine-tune your car is measuring the 12 parameters of your car. The 12 parameters are shown in the booklet table of contents. All of the parameters are easy to measure and a vernier caliper is included in the design package to measure 5 of them. The other 7 are also easy to measure. As you finish the booklet, it leads you right into the VR electronic Help Manual of the VR program and tells you exactly how to enter your car data and do design and virtual racing of your car.

As examples of this book, we have page 19 showing how to measure the coefficient of friction of the wheel/axle (the Help Manual shows a more sophisticated way to do this). Also we have reproduced page 9 which shows the last of 2 pages on measuring the center of mass of your car.