Ball Bounce Blog

Well, here it is, the first blog of the year.  School has started again, and physics is as fun as ever.  This year my teacher opened up by having everyone juggle and recite a 100 or more word speech (but not at the same time).  This was probably the most important lesson he could have taught us, right off the bat.  We also learned a lot about my teacher's son's rock climbing experience and the power of chicken nuggets.
Moving on, we did a lab in class about the bounce of a ball and how high it goes compared to the height when it is dropped.  My group predicted that it was linear and proportional.  When we tested it out we found that it in fact was.  However, there was one slight hiccup.  We didn't know if when we drop the ball we measure the drop height at the bottom of the ball or the top.  We did the top but that ended up being the wrong way to do it.  It was okay because that made such little difference in the results that we were fine.  In the end we found that for every meter added to the drop height, there are .71 meters added to the bounce height.  Other groups got different results and as a class we collectively decided that it is always a proportion, but that proportion depends on what is being dropped.  A super ball will have a high proportion close to one, but something else may be close to zero.  This is now called the bounce coefficient.