Sam McKee, Rodney Sunday, & Victoria Stock

Statement of the experimental goal

In practice, it is often not simple to develop a clear experimental goal. So well break it down into
a couple smaller parts.

1. What is your dependent variable?

The dependent variable in our experiment is the force of drag.

2. Whats your independent variable?

The independent variable will be the surface area of the different sized balls we are
testing. We are testing a baseball, a softball, a ping pong ball, and a basketball.

3. Why do you think this is interesting?

We find this interesting because it is a follow up experiment to how drag force can affect
us in the sports that we play.

Its worth justifying why youre doing the experiment. What are the possible applications of
what youre studying? Why should someone else care about this experiment?
Sports teams have to take into account the different drag forces at different altitudes. For
an example, the MLB team in Colorado had to change their field in order to make playing
conditions more fair. The air is less dense the higher in altitude you go, therefore the ball
would potentially travel farther with less drag force acting on it. Someone else should
care about this because it can adversely affect the way games are played!

Background & Prediction

What do you expect the relationship between your independent and dependent variable to be?
Why? What physical principles are important in your experiment?

The relationship between surface area and force of drag is shown in the equation:
F drag = p * S A * v 2
Based on this equation, there is a linear relationship between surface area and drag
force. We expect that the drag force should be be greater on the objects with a greater
surface area. Physical principles that are important in our experiment is dropping the
balls from a height high enough to reach terminal velocity and keeping the recording
device at the same place for each trial.

Experimental Design
The fun but tricky part.
How are you actually going to measure the relationship between your independent and
dependent variables?
 Surface area can be calculated manually by us by using:
S A = * r2
Force of drag can be calculated by using Tracker to calculate terminal velocity and using
the calculated surface area and the known drag coefficient of air.

What materials do you have that you can use?

We have a softball, baseball, tennis ball, ping pong ball, basketball, lacrosse ball,
handball, yoga ball, soccer ball, and volleyball. We will also record the videos on our
phones and use Tracker to help us conduct the experiment.

What will your setup and procedure be?

Set up will include finding a space where we are able to drop the balls high enough to
ensure we reach terminal velocity. We will need to ensure our camera is able to pick up
the motion in a way that out balls can be tracked by Tracker.
The procedure will include trials of dropping balls of different size and recording a video
of them. The video will then be analyzed in Tracker.

How many measurements do you need to make to determine the relationship between your
variables and to minimize your uncertainty to an acceptable level?
We need ten total measurements, so one trial per ball that you have.

How will you control external factors?

Wind is a big external factor that we can face during our experiment. If possible we plan
to overcome this by finding an indoor location that is still high enough for us to achieve
terminal velocity.

What are the possible sources of uncertainty in your design, and how will you minimize them?
Sources of uncertainty in our design could include having problems with the Tracker
software, potentially not reaching terminal velocity, and not properly calculating the
surface area of the objects we are using.

Your final project design is due by 5pm on Friday (11/4). Upload a document which addresses
these points to Google Drive.