Physics of Sports
How To Hit A Home-run In Baseball
Our assignment was to make a video....
Our second assignment in STEM was to create a video, about 1-4 minutes in length, that describes how to improve someone’s performance in a sport using the content learned in this class. My group consisted of Myself and 3 others, Sage, Collin, and Gordy.
We first brainstormed all possibles sports, things like polo, swimming, frisbee, etc. We eliminated all the ones that we didn’t like and ended up with one idea that we all liked, baseball. We decided that most people would like to know how to hit a homerun, so we made that our topic in our video.
We spent about 10 days filming, getting every shot possible and trying to hit the home runs, and we hit a surprising amount. We spent another day doing our calculations, things like velocity, height, distance, etc, then the next 2 days editing. Most voice-overs were done at home, whenever any of us were able to do it.
Physics:
Units:
There were both positives and negative to the project, but not involving the content. More about positives and negatives about me. What did I do well, other than content, and what did I do not so well.
First, the negatives. I feel like I wasn’t being assertive enough on this project. Many times my group was off task and I wasn’t able to make them focus. This is terrible as I had to do everything last minute. I can improve this by keeping my groups focus and not letting them screw around.
The other negative was the timing. This goes with my first negative, as I wasn’t able to get everyone else’s voice over and I had to do it last minute. If I had made my group work harder, then I wouldn’t have finished the project the night before. I would have it done days before it’s due. I can improve this by working on my project at home. This would cause my project to be done much sooner.
Now the positives. My first one is my editing skill. This project made me really learn a lot about editing, I feel as if my knowledge of edits has grown 10 fold. This is good, as I do want to make more edits for videos in the future.
My second positive was my ability to be more independent. I was able to do my work and say,”You did it.”. I used to be really unsure if I was correct when I did something alone, but for whatever reason I'm now able to confidently make answers or solutions for any problem without discussing with others.
This project was really fun to do, and I hope we do more projects like this in the future.
Our second assignment in STEM was to create a video, about 1-4 minutes in length, that describes how to improve someone’s performance in a sport using the content learned in this class. My group consisted of Myself and 3 others, Sage, Collin, and Gordy.
We first brainstormed all possibles sports, things like polo, swimming, frisbee, etc. We eliminated all the ones that we didn’t like and ended up with one idea that we all liked, baseball. We decided that most people would like to know how to hit a homerun, so we made that our topic in our video.
We spent about 10 days filming, getting every shot possible and trying to hit the home runs, and we hit a surprising amount. We spent another day doing our calculations, things like velocity, height, distance, etc, then the next 2 days editing. Most voice-overs were done at home, whenever any of us were able to do it.
Physics:
Units:
- We always measure time in seconds
- Distance was always measured in meters
- Mass is shown in kilograms
- Force in shown in newtons and pounds. There are 4.5 newtons in a pound
- Momentum and impulse are both measured in n*s.
- Velocity. This is the rate of covered distance in a direction. The equation to solve for this is velocity = change in distance/change in time. This is measured in m/s (meters per second). We had found that our velocity of a ball after leaving the bat was 30.4 M/s
- Vertical distance. In our project, we found how high the ball was at it’s peak. We used the equation distance=½*acceleration*time^2. The acceleration is 9.8m/s^2 due to gravity and the time was 0.96s. Our peak vertical distance was 4.5 meters from the ground.
- Horizontal distance. We didn’t need to use an equation for this, as we only had to measure how from the batting box was from where the ball landed, which had an average of 60 meters
- Force. In order to find the force that the bat exerted on the ball we had to identify the equation to use. We decided on the mv=Ft equation. This translates to momentum = impulse, or mass*velocity=Force*time. We plugged in all our number and solved for force. We converted it to pounds and got 1100 lbs of force.
There were both positives and negative to the project, but not involving the content. More about positives and negatives about me. What did I do well, other than content, and what did I do not so well.
First, the negatives. I feel like I wasn’t being assertive enough on this project. Many times my group was off task and I wasn’t able to make them focus. This is terrible as I had to do everything last minute. I can improve this by keeping my groups focus and not letting them screw around.
The other negative was the timing. This goes with my first negative, as I wasn’t able to get everyone else’s voice over and I had to do it last minute. If I had made my group work harder, then I wouldn’t have finished the project the night before. I would have it done days before it’s due. I can improve this by working on my project at home. This would cause my project to be done much sooner.
Now the positives. My first one is my editing skill. This project made me really learn a lot about editing, I feel as if my knowledge of edits has grown 10 fold. This is good, as I do want to make more edits for videos in the future.
My second positive was my ability to be more independent. I was able to do my work and say,”You did it.”. I used to be really unsure if I was correct when I did something alone, but for whatever reason I'm now able to confidently make answers or solutions for any problem without discussing with others.
This project was really fun to do, and I hope we do more projects like this in the future.