Physics of sports video

Physics of Football


This is the final product of our Physics of Football video.

Explanation of Project

For our second project of the year, we created an informational video, on the physics of a chosen sport. The pupose of this video was to help the stars of these sports understand and utilize the physics behind there actions

Evidence of work

The sport our team chose was football. We thought it would be an interesting sport to calculate the physics behind. We also thought it would make for the most entertaining video since our group was all girls, and have minimal football experience all together. However, we definitely gained more knowledge of the sport through this project. Located at right is our Story board and below is the brief breakdown of our video as well as our script:

  • High Schooler's throwing a football
  • NFL passes and catches
  • Physics of Passes/catches
  • Examples of plays
  • Tackling
Script STEM.pdf

Process

The process of making this video was very fun and I enjoyed it a lot. To start off, we drafted our storyboard (above) and our script (at left). Then we got it aproved and began filming. The first step to filming our Physics of Football video was looking the part, so we borrowed San Marin High football jerseys. The we began by filming all the action shots, which included us throwing, catching and tackeling. Next we used a whiteboard to write out and show all of the calculations below. Finally, we edited and added voiceovers to explain all of the shots and tie it all together.


Calculations

Within this project we calculated four crucial physics aspects. The full equations and calculations are attached

  1. Force of impact: When caught, the ball has a force of inpact of 17.44 N or about 4lbs of force on the catcher
  2. Velocity(Horizontal): The velocity of the ball, when it is horizontal in the air, is 9 m/s or about 20 mph
  3. Velocity(Vertical): The velocity of the ball, as it leaves the person's hand is 5 m/s or about 11mph
  4. Velocity(total): This makes the total velocity of the ball 10.3 m/s or 23mph



Reflection

Overall, I really enjoyed this project and I really enjoyed the people I worked with. We collaborated well together and all had good ideas to contribute. I am very proud of the video we made and it may be my favorite project so far. For being an all girls group, talking about football, I believe we did fairly well. Something I specifically did well in this group was participate in the planning more by helping create the storyboard and doing the calculations. I also asked what I could do to help and even starting tasks that needed to be done so we didn't fall behind. Something I could have improved on was our time managment. Even though we were highly productive, being in a group with close freinds can be a little distracting. I could have taken more initative and try to direct our focus back on the project. All together, This was a great project and I am very proud of the work we acomplished.