🏀 Counting bounces: the whole packet

🏀 Counting bounces · kindergarten · 1 day of testing · free · 20 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 many times it bounces before it rolls 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

• 🏓 Four different balls: tennis, rubber, foam and ping-pong: a tennis ball, a rubber ball and a foam ball
• 🖍️ Crayons or markers
• 📄 Paper

Be safe: 🧍 Drop from standing: never climb

1. Stand on a hard floor and hold the tennis ball up as high as your nose.
2. Let go. Don't throw it, just open your hand.
3. Count every bounce out loud until it rolls away.
4. Your grown-up writes the number down. Do it two more times.
5. Now do three drops with the rubber ball, and three with the foam ball.
6. Colour one box for each bounce. Which ball has the tallest stack?

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

I changed: Ball   I measured: how many times it bounces before it rolls (bounces)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: ball along the bottom, bounces 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 on carpet as well as the hard floor, and count the bounces on both.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which ball bounces the most times?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the kind of ball would change how many times it bounces before it rolls, 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) and measured how many times it bounces before it rolls in bounces.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept dropping it from the same height and the same hard floor 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 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: Tennis ball and Foam 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 on carpet as well as the hard floor, and count the bounces on both.