The Physics behind the Perfect Baseball Hit
For our second project, we were tasked with using physics to analyze a sport, and how to use physics to improve how you play the game. Our group (me, Daria Hoang, Peter Hunt, and Zach Roesler) chose to use baseball as our sport, since many of us play baseball, and the World Series about to be played. After carefully scripting our video and putting together a rough storyboard, we went out to the softball field (the other fields were being worked on), and I threw a few pitches Peter's way. A couple lost balls later, he ended up hitting two home runs. We went back to our "studio" (actually Mr. Williams' room) and calculated/approximated all of the physical numbers (pun intended). Then it was a simple matter of putting my genius iMovie editing skills to use (humble, I know), and we now have the finished product above.
Like any project, this project had it's ups and downs, its positive vertical velocity, and its negative vertical velocity. This project helped me to polish up my rusty iMovie editing skills (thanks Mr. Case!), and I thought that I did a good job editing, particularly timing the music to certain parts of the video, and in re-tuning the Ken Burns effect so that it focused on the ball, and not on a random tree (iMovie is a very strange program sometimes...). I did learn a lot though, and one thing that I especially thought was more practical was when Nick showed me an improved and more efficient way to download YouTube videos. The old way was somewhat more...clunky. In the way he showed me, you just downloaded a Firefox add-on, then you just click one button, and boom, downloaded. I did think, however, that as the editor, I could have communicated a little bit better with my group mates, as there was some miscommunication of what people wanted the end product to look like. I also think that both me and my group could have had a better idea of what we wanted the finished video to look like, it wasn't near the end that we really had a true direction to go in. Oh and another downside was Zach getting hit by a groundball. Sorry Zach!
Some key concepts used in this project were:
Projectile Motion: The flight path of a projectile is called projectile motion, and is represented in a parabolic arc.
Velocity: The velocity is basically speed with direction. It is rate of how far an object goes in a certain time. So, it can be calculated by taking the distance and dividing it by time.
Acceleration: Acceleration is how the velocity of an object changes with time, and so it is calculated by the velocity divided time. Acceleration vertically is the only thing to change, since excluding air resistance, there are no forces acting on the object horizontally. Vertical acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2
Horizontal/Vertical Velocity: These are exactly what they sound like, the velocity of a ball vertically and horizontally. The vertical velocity is always changing due to acceleration due to gravity, while horizontal velocity doesn't change at all.
Impact Forces: Impulse: Impulse is how much force is applied to an object over a given time. This is calculated as force x time. Impulse is equal to momentum (mass x velocity), which is how much motion an object has.
Like any project, this project had it's ups and downs, its positive vertical velocity, and its negative vertical velocity. This project helped me to polish up my rusty iMovie editing skills (thanks Mr. Case!), and I thought that I did a good job editing, particularly timing the music to certain parts of the video, and in re-tuning the Ken Burns effect so that it focused on the ball, and not on a random tree (iMovie is a very strange program sometimes...). I did learn a lot though, and one thing that I especially thought was more practical was when Nick showed me an improved and more efficient way to download YouTube videos. The old way was somewhat more...clunky. In the way he showed me, you just downloaded a Firefox add-on, then you just click one button, and boom, downloaded. I did think, however, that as the editor, I could have communicated a little bit better with my group mates, as there was some miscommunication of what people wanted the end product to look like. I also think that both me and my group could have had a better idea of what we wanted the finished video to look like, it wasn't near the end that we really had a true direction to go in. Oh and another downside was Zach getting hit by a groundball. Sorry Zach!
Some key concepts used in this project were:
Projectile Motion: The flight path of a projectile is called projectile motion, and is represented in a parabolic arc.
Velocity: The velocity is basically speed with direction. It is rate of how far an object goes in a certain time. So, it can be calculated by taking the distance and dividing it by time.
Acceleration: Acceleration is how the velocity of an object changes with time, and so it is calculated by the velocity divided time. Acceleration vertically is the only thing to change, since excluding air resistance, there are no forces acting on the object horizontally. Vertical acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2
Horizontal/Vertical Velocity: These are exactly what they sound like, the velocity of a ball vertically and horizontally. The vertical velocity is always changing due to acceleration due to gravity, while horizontal velocity doesn't change at all.
Impact Forces: Impulse: Impulse is how much force is applied to an object over a given time. This is calculated as force x time. Impulse is equal to momentum (mass x velocity), which is how much motion an object has.