Data capture is an important part of any scientist’s research. Our camera-captured rocket data unfortunately was not granular enough to analyze and recent weather conditions prevented us from taking better quality footage.

We captured fresh footage of a bouncing ping pong balls in ideal indoor conditions and got good footage. The students analysed this footage frame-by-frame (30fps) to construct a position vs. time graph.  They noticed how in some parts of the footage the ball was blurred, and in others it clear. I prompted the students to compare the time of those moments with the associated part of the graph. They found that those moments were at the peaks! Meaning that for those brief moments the ball was moving very still. We used this to introduce the notion of determining the magnitude of the balls speed based off of, or derived, from the position graph. This is the part of the underlying theory of calculus.

Next class we will calculate an exact value for the slopes of a curve on a graph and plot the ball’s speed and acceleration, the first and second derivative of position! Great job today!