Xin Phong

Period 3

Lab Report 

The purpose of our lab was to find out if objects we drop at a certain height fall at a constant rate in air. What we did was similar to Galileo's experiment with acceleration with two falling objects. My group and I chose 4 different sized and density balls. We had a tennis ball, a ping pong ball, a golf ball, and a training ball. Two of us were at an elevated ground, throwing the ball down to the lower ground for our other teammate to observe and record the time it took for the balls to hit the ground. We repeated the process four times for each of the four balls we used. Then we took the average time and with that we found the acceleration by d=1/2(a)(t)^2. The first four measurements for the golf ball is .99, .97, 1.03, and .98. The time measurements for the ping pong balls were 1.00, 1.25, 1.36, and 1.06. The measurements for the training ball were 1.41, 1.36, 1.30, and 1.13. For the tennis ball we got the measurements of 1.17, 1.14, 1.21, and 1.13. Some possible errors could have been the amount of air resistance that was present, or the initial external forces that could have pushed the ball.