🏓 Ball kinds and bounce: the whole packet

🏓 Ball kinds and bounce · 1st–4th grade · 1 day of testing · about $3 · 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 kind of ball, then how high the ball bounces will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

4 levels × 3 tries at each = 12 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🏓 Four different balls: tennis, rubber, foam and ping-pong
• 📏 A tape measure, or a long ruler
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines

Be safe: 🧍 Drop from standing: never climb

1. Tape the tape measure up a wall, with 0 at the floor.
2. Hold the tennis ball next to the tape, with its bottom at 100 cm.
3. Let go. Don't throw it! Stand on the floor and never climb.
4. A helper crouches by the tape and watches how high the ball's bottom gets on its first bounce.
5. Write the height in your table under Try 1.
6. Drop it two more times from the same spot.
7. Do three drops with the rubber ball, three with the foam ball and three with the ping-pong ball.
8. Find the middle number for each ball, and draw a bar graph.

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

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

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: kind of ball 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 each ball onto a hard floor and onto carpet, and draw a bar for every ball and floor.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which kind of ball bounces highest?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the kind of ball 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 kind of ball (Tennis ball, Rubber ball, Foam ball, Ping-pong ball) 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 floor and dropping every ball from the same height the same, so only the kind of ball was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 4 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: Tennis ball and Ping-pong ball 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 each ball onto a hard floor and onto carpet, and draw a bar for every ball and floor.