Data Capture and Research

Data capture is an important part of any scientist’s research. Our camera-captured rocket data unfortunately was not granular enough to analyse and 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. The instructor 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 not moving much at all, almost still. The instructor 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. The students were shown how to take the difference of one data point to the next and plot THAT. This second plot, showed the ball’s SPEED and although it was noisier than the first, the students found the relationship between the two graphs undeniable. We tried taking the second derivative of position to view acceleration, but the source data was too inaccurate to get a good trendline. The students however grasped the material conceptually very well.