Why Do Vernier Carts Give Good Results

Vernier wanted to know if their carts give good results to the high school students that use them. Three types of collisions: Velcro, spring, and magnet were conducted to find the momentum and kinetic energy. Velocity was found using graphs, and this ultimately found the efficiency of both momentum and kinetic energy. As seen in Table 4 and Table 5, the efficiency of all the momentum and spring and magnet kinetic energies are close to 1, or 100% conservation. The kinetic efficiencies for the Velcro collisions were all close to half the initial amount of energy. This is what was expected to happen and therefore, it can be concluded that the Vernier carts give good results. However, there were some efficiencies that came out to be over 1, which
is impossible. But, this may be due to choosing the wrong portions of the velocity graph to record, which had nothing to do with how the carts performed in the experiment. Other sources of error could be friction, as it was not calculated in this experiment.