For this project our task was to make a video about the physics behind a sport. Our first step was to pick a sport. We picked water polo and we decided to talk about the physics behind a skip shot. A skip shot is when a player bounces the ball off the water and into the goal. Before we started filming we created a script neatly displaying what everyone would be saying and when they would be saying it. We also created a story board so we knew what shots we would be filming and where we would be filming them. We had three days to complete the story board and script. In addition to that we had 5 days to complete all of our filming and editing.
Concepts
To make the perfect water polo skip shot there is a simple procedure you need to follow 1. Pick the up with your strong arm and point your opposite shoulder and hip toward the goal. 2. Aim the ball at the water a few feet in front of you 3. Start eggbeatering very fast to get high out of the water. Use your non-shooting hand to scull in the water for an added boost. The higher you are, the more leverage you will have to add power to your shot. 4. As soon as you pop up, throw the ball at the surface of the water with as much force as possible, the faster it's traveling, the better the skip and be sure to put a good backspin on the ball. The strong backspin prevents the ball from sticking to the water. 5. Follow through on your throw, slapping the water with your hand when you are finished.
We started out by finding the average mass of a water polo ball. It turned out to be around 0.45kg. Then we watched the video of me throwing the water polo ball and figured out how long the ball is in the air. From here we were able to calculate the force I exerted on the ball which was 13 Newtons, the ball was traveling at 10 m/s, the ball had a momentum of 4.5 Ns, and had an acceleration of 20 m/s. We also found that the average horizontal velocity was 10 m/s and after hitting the water the vertical velocity is 3.6 m/s.
Definitions of our concepts
Force: Push or pull on an object (Unit- Newton) Momentum: Tendency of moving objects to keep moving (Unit- Newton Seconds) Acceleration: Rate of change in velocity (Unit- Meters/second Squared)
Reflection
I felt that my group did a very good job while creating this video. In the beginning when we were deciding on what sport to pick other groups struggled to pick one, but we all agreed fairly quickly that a water polo skip shot would be very unique and awesome! Throughout the project we worked very good with one another and everything turned out great!
I think that our video had a very good flow to it. We made sure not to talk to much about the math concepts at once. We tried to break things up a little by switch around camera angles and breaking up the talking equally amongst us. I also think it was a good idea for us to put in the calculations on the screen as we talked about them. This made it so the viewers can have a visual aid as they watch our video.
One thing I think we could have improved on was having a more clearly laid out storyboard. During our filming we didn't really know what shots to take and where. We mainly just went off our script. Having a better storyboard would help us because we would know exactly what shots we would have to take everyday.
One thing we that we did very well on was our time management. Everyday when we would come into class we would get to work right away. We were able to have our video completed almost two days early! This was good because we were able to edit our video more and perfect it.
Overall I think this project was a great success. I was able to take what I learned about time management from when we built or Rube Goldberg machines and use that to my advantage during this project and we were able to finish with plenty of time to tweak things. I was also able to work better with group members by listening to everyones ideas and include everyone equally in the project.