Making the Project

In this STEM Physics and Engineering project, me and a group of others were tasked with making a video about the physics behind a certain action in a sport. The sport we chose was lacrosse, and the lacrosse action we chose to focus on was the action of shooting a goal. We started off by creating a plan for what videos we needed to take, and how we were going to lay out the video. We then went to a field, and took multiple videos of our lacrosse player shooting goals as well as videos of the actions they preformed before shooting, such as footwork and the angling of their stick. Then the group worked on the calculations for the project, which included calculating the velocity, force of impact, and conservation of momentum. Next, we pieced the videos together to follow the storyboard we had already created, and got to work creating a script and editing details onto the video to make it look better. Once we finished the editing, we added a background track, and incorporated the calculations into the video in order to produce our final result, the Physics of Sport Video.

Script/Storyboard

Final Video

Calculations

Physics Concepts

Force of Impact- The force of impact is the force that is acting on objects whenever the collide with something, such as a car crash. The force of impact on an object can be calculated with this equation: (Change in Velocity/ Change in Time x 2) times Mass. The force of impact on the ball we threw was 37.2N, or 13lbs of force.

Horizontal Velocity- Horizontal velocity is the speed in direction of an object on a horizontal plane. Horizontal velocity can be calculated by dividing the horizontal displacement, or distance an object has traveled from the starting point, by the time. The horizontal velocity for the rise of the ball was calculated at 1.47 m/s, and the horizontal velocity of the fall of the ball was calculated to be 4.41 m/s.

Vertical Velocity- Vertical velocity, or Vv, is speed in direction of an object on a vertical plane. Vv can be found by finding the objects initial velocity and adding the time it took to fall x the acceleration of gravity. We calculated the Vv of the ball to be 20 m/s. 

Total Velocity- This is the measure of velocity of an object when combining 2 or more relative velocities. If you are familiar with Geometry, this is like Pythagorean Theorem, and uses the same equation set up. The equation to find this is Vh²+Vv²=Vtotal. The total velocity of our ball was 20.48 m/s. 

Transfer of Momentum- The transfer of momentum is the amount of momentum transferred from one particle to another during a collision or interaction. The equation to find the transfer of momentum is m1v1 + m2v2 = m1v1 '+ m2v2 '. The transfer of momentum from the body to the stick to the ball was calculated to be 8.27 m/s. 

Reflection

In this project, I learned a whole lot, including stuff about areas that I tend to succeed in and areas that for me need a little more work in for them to truly be great. Two of the areas that I really succeed in in this project were my collaboration, and my communication. I was able to collaborate really well with the people in my group, and we were all able to equally divide up the work and get the job done well. My groups communication was also top tier, as we were able to fix any little kinks we had in the videos development process just by talking them out, which was huge. However, the 2 areas that I could definitely improve upon were was my ability to be a conscientious learning, as well as my critical thinking. While I did show a lot of those traits, I feel like I could make those better, as they were definitely my weakest points, as I never really excelled with demonstrating them. This is my reflection of what I did well and could improve on during this amazing project.