🎾 Bouncing balls on different floors: the whole packet

🎾 Bouncing balls on different floors · 1st–5th grade · 1 day of testing · free · 40 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 14 days away

Count back from your fair day and write in each date. Fewer days than this? The jobs share days, in this order; nothing is skipped.

Dates from my teacher

• My question is due
• Testing starts
• My results table and graph are due
• My board is due

In this packet

1. 🗓️ My project plan
2. 💭 My hypothesis
3. 🧺 Change, measure, keep the same
4. 🪜 My steps
5. 📊 My results
6. 📓 My logbook
7. ✅ My conclusion
8. ✂️ Board titles to cut out
9. 🏅 The judge's questions and my certificate

If I change the floor the ball lands on, then how high the ball bounces will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

3 levels × 3 tries at each = 9 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🎾 A tennis ball or a playground ball
• 📏 A tape measure, or a long ruler
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines

Be safe: ✅ Nothing sharp, hot or small

1. Tape the tape measure up a wall, with 0 at the floor.
2. Hold the ball next to the tape at 100 cm.
3. Let go. Don't throw it!
4. A helper watches how high the bottom of the ball gets on the first bounce.
5. Write the number in your table.
6. Drop it two more times on the same floor.
7. Move to a different floor and do three more drops.
8. Lay a folded bath towel down and do three drops on it.
9. Draw a bar for each floor. Which bounced highest?

Write each number in your results table the moment you measure it.

I changed: Floor   I measured: how high the ball bounces (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: floor along the bottom, cm up the side)

What I noticed: ______________________________________________

Write something every day you work on it, even the days you only gather things. More days? The three-page logbook prints from peabody.kids/science-fair/templates/logbook.

My hypothesis was ☐ right ☐ partly right ☐ not right.

I know because my numbers show:

What surprised me, or what might have gone wrong (7th and up):

Next time I would test:

Idea: Change a second thing: drop the ball from 50, 100 and 150 cm on each floor, and draw a line for each floor.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which floor makes a ball bounce highest?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the floor the ball lands on would change how high the ball bounces, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed the floor the ball lands on (Carpet, Hard floor (wood or tile), A folded towel) and measured how high the ball bounces in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same ball and dropping it from the same height the same, so only the floor the ball lands on was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 3 levels, and I found the middle number.
6. What did you find out? Show me in your numbers. Say something like: Look at my table: Carpet and A folded towel gave different numbers, and here's the pattern.
7. Was your hypothesis right? How do you know? Say something like: My numbers show whether I was right, partly right or not, and I can show you where.
8. Did anything go wrong, or surprise you? Say something like: One try was odd, so I did it again and wrote it in my logbook.
9. If you did it again, what would you change or test next? Say something like: I'd change a second thing: drop the ball from 50, 100 and 150 cm on each floor, and draw a line for each floor.