Discussion From the data our computers calculated, our group found the vertical acceleration of our tennis

ball to be -10.8 m/s/s. Theoretically, ignoring air resistance, all objects on earth should accelerate downward at 9.8 m/s/s. Why then did all but group 4 come to a larger number than that? Two questions were posed in the manual: is the horizontal velocity linked to the vertical acceleration of the ball, and is the mass of the ball linked to the vertical acceleration. Here are scatter plots comparing the data of these 2 questions:

As seen by the graphs, there does not seem to be any link between the mass and downward acceleration, or the horizontal velocity and the downward acceleration. This agrees with the theory behind motion along perpendicular directions, and with the theory of gravitational force. What then caused our computers to calculate significantly larger figures for g in our experiment? When throwing the ball between lab partners, the meter stick was further away from the camera observing us than the ball we were tossing. This could have caused our computer to have a warped perception of distance, inflating the changes in position of the ball vs time. To account for this in the future, we should measure the approximate distance between the plane of motion of the ball and the camera, and the distance between the meter stick and the camera. Then we could use the math behind similar triangles to adjust for this warped perception.