Calculate the area under the Force vs Time graph by visually estimating the values to determine the Impulse the Cart experienced during the collision.
Use the mass of the cart (100 grams) and the velocity displayed before and after the collision to determine the change in momentum of the Cart during the collision.
Impulse-Momentum theory states that the Impulse an object experiences equals the change in its momentum. Calculate both and show that they equal each other, within the limits of typical experimental error.This simulation mimics real physical experiments where there are always going to be sources of error that impact your results. As long as the two calculated values are within a few percent of each other, this is sufficient to say the theory has been proven within the limits allowed by experimental error.
Adapted from a simulation written by Andrew Duffy. physics.bu.edu/~duffy/HTML5/index.html