On Friday, Student Government hosted our second annual glow dance, CDGLOW 2.0. When setting up the dance, we had to go to the DOME to get our gallon buckets of glow paint. These buckets are very heavy. We decided to put them on a rolling cart to make the journey to the gym faster. There was one point when we had to push the cart stacked with paint up an incline. In order to accelerate the cart, we needed to apply a force on it, to get it to move up the ramp. The minimum force we needed to apply to get the cart up the ramp had to counter the component of the weight of the car and paint acting along the ramp along with the force of friction.
After the dance was over, we only had a few gallons of paint left over, so the cart was much lighter and easier to push. When we went down the incline, we did not need to apply as great of a force as we did earlier in the night. Physics is everywhere, even at high school homecoming dances.
