How to play Lift Trips
- Choose a trip and read its floors in order. Each floor is 3 m and up is positive.
- Distance: add the size of every stretch the lift travels, ignoring direction.
- Displacement: final height minus starting height, with its sign.
- Type both and press Play. Compare the trip log and the displacement arrow with your prediction.
Distance adds every stretch; displacement compares start and finish
The distance travelled is a scalar: it adds the size of every piece of the path, so it can only grow and is never negative. The displacement is a vector, here along one vertical axis: Δy = y_final − y_initial. It ignores everything in between, so a round trip has zero displacement, and a trip that ends lower than it started has a negative one. The size of the displacement is never larger than the distance, and they are equal only when the motion never turns back.
A focused learning model
The lift moves at a constant 2 m/s between floors and waits exactly 1 s at each intermediate stop, with no acceleration or braking. Its position is the height of its floor above the ground floor. Floors are exactly 3 m apart. Playback runs 3 times faster than real time.