Science Rocks

The Science Experiment of the Year!

Do you know what will happen when you have the best Science class of the year? It will never change! Well, it may, but as for me it won’t because I did a fun experiment on Potential and Kinetic Energy. My question for this experiment was… Does a bouncy ball have more K.E. when the track is at a 135 degree angle without a loop-d-loop, or with a loop-d-loop at a 135 degree angle? What I did to research was I watched a BrainPop video, took notes on the video, took a quiz on the video, and took a field trip to the playground. With all that research, I had to know the answer to the question, so I answered the one without a loop-d-loop would go faster than the one with a loop-d-loop!

I got a foam tube from my teacher. I taped the foam tube to a pool table in my houses at a 135 degree angle. When it was at the 135 degree angle, I dropped a bouncy ball on the track and recorded the time it took to drop in the cup at the bottom. I did five trials and the average time for this set was 0.566 of a second. Then, I made the track with the loop-d-loop. The first time I put the ball on this track it took 0.67 of a second to reach the cup. The next four tries, the bouncy ball either didn’t complete the track or fell off the track. I couldn’t find an average for the loop-d-loop because there was only one successful time and I needed more than one successful time to find the average.

Would you have any idea why the loop-d-loop track wasn’t so successful? If you don’t know why, it’s okay because I do. It did not have enough K.E. to fight gravity to stay on the track. Why did the track without the loop-d-loop work? Well, because the ball did not need to fight gravity to stay on the track. My hypothesis was correct!