Physics of Sports

This project was made to help us learn about force of impact and the idea of impulse, along with horizontal and vertical velocity. We were told to choose a sports action that would apply to some San Marin students. Claire Kilgariff, Natalie Davilla (apologies for any name spelling errors), and I chose to focus our project around perfecting a lacrosse throw. We started with a brainstorm of all of the different sports that we knew and played that we could do our project on. We chose lacrosse, as it seemed original and two out of the three of us currently play it. We created a storyboard and rough script for our video. We got to work recording me and my group mates performing different actions with lacrosse sticks and balls. We then went back to the classroom to voice over the recordings with our calculations of the various velocities and forces. After that, all that was needed was some non-copyright music to put over the video to finish is up.

Concepts

Force of Impact

This is the measurement of how much energy is being transferred from one object to another at a given moment. Force of impact can be found for by solving the equation, mass*velocity=Force of Impact*Time of Impact.

Horizontal Velocity

This is the directional speed of an object parallel to the ground. It can be found by dividing distance travelled by the time it took to travel that far. Horizontal velocity is independent of vertical velocity.

Vertical Velocity

This is the directional speed of an object perpendicular to the ground. It is calculated by determining acceleration due to gravity times the time that the object falls. Vertical velocity is independent of horizontal velocity.

Total Velocity

Total velocity is exactly what it is called. It is found by using the pythagorean theorem (a^2+b^2=c^2) in which the legs of the right triangle are horizontal and vertical velocity and the total velocity is the hypotenuse.

1080p.MOV

Physics of Sports: Lacrosse

I am unable to get the full version of the video as of right now but here it is without the voiceovers.

Reflection

I think that I did a good job with leadership in this project. This is most likely because I was one of the people in my group who played lacrosse and thoroughly enjoyed it and understood it. I think I also learned in this project that three heads are better than one. That is, tasks may be done faster if three people work on all of them on by one rather than three people splitting up the work to do solo. I think for the next project I want to make sure that all of my team is on task, including me. Multiple times during this project, I found myself forgoing 100% focus on productivity for messing around with my group. I also think I could have improved on my planning skills. Many of the voice-overs were written mere minutes before they were recorded, and this had an effect on the quality of them and the time consumed to make them. Next time, I could make a script or plan that goes more into detail about everything that will be involved in the project. Overall, this was a fun and educational project that increased my understanding of physics and myself.

Here Are Some Calculations That we Used in our Project

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