Project History
Shortly after the completion of my Rube Goldberg machine, a new task was at hand. We would be exploring forces, velocity, and a few other physics topics with a sports action. As well as this, we would have to explain both how to do the action and how to improve it with our knowledge of these topics. The initial step was to choose the action. My group decided we would use Lindsey's prior acrobatic expertise to aid us in the conquest with an aerial cartwheel. We were then told to script and storyboard a brief but detailed and professional video pertaining to our exploration. After both filming the aerial and taking some measurements, we also filmed and recorded Arno, Jacob, and I talking about the different components. We finally touched up the video and uploaded it to YouTube.
The first thing we calculated was Lindsey's horizontal velocity, that is her average velocity as she completes the aerial. We found this to be 3.20 meters per second. That's about 7.16 miles per hour. Because we had so adamantly studied forces during the course of the project, we decided to next calculate how much force Lindsey exerted on the ground when she began the aerial which was 1,736.7 Newtons. We also calculated her momentum during the aerial. This calculation was found by multiplying her mass by her velocity and we found it was 173.76 kilogram meters per second.
One thing that seemed to be almost intentional was that we were studying sports while the Major League Baseball season had advance to the playoffs. I would often find myself thinking about vectors as I watched the Giants battle their way to the World Series. When Travis Ishikawa hit the game-winning home run in the NLCS my mind had drifted to the angle at which he had to hit the ball to beat air resistance and gravity. The application of physics to something as leisure as sports was quite astounding to me as it gave me another perspective to look at the world through.
The first thing we calculated was Lindsey's horizontal velocity, that is her average velocity as she completes the aerial. We found this to be 3.20 meters per second. That's about 7.16 miles per hour. Because we had so adamantly studied forces during the course of the project, we decided to next calculate how much force Lindsey exerted on the ground when she began the aerial which was 1,736.7 Newtons. We also calculated her momentum during the aerial. This calculation was found by multiplying her mass by her velocity and we found it was 173.76 kilogram meters per second.
One thing that seemed to be almost intentional was that we were studying sports while the Major League Baseball season had advance to the playoffs. I would often find myself thinking about vectors as I watched the Giants battle their way to the World Series. When Travis Ishikawa hit the game-winning home run in the NLCS my mind had drifted to the angle at which he had to hit the ball to beat air resistance and gravity. The application of physics to something as leisure as sports was quite astounding to me as it gave me another perspective to look at the world through.