I believe I can fly...and bounce!

Nothing like a group of Juniors and Seniors playing with a rubber bouncy ball in the hallway, right!?!? But this wasn't just bouncing a ball off a wall for the heck of it. This was seeing how high the ball would bounce from certain distances. Each group did their own thing, some had a different ball, different groups had different heights that they picked, but you had to figure out a way to see how it bounced back up. After which, we graphed our data, looking for a pattern. Our eventual goal? To predict the bounce of our ball if we dropped from the FPAC Balcony.

Procedure:
We had to repeat a process of dropping a ball and recording its initial bounce height 10 times. On ones that we were unsure of, we would redo the bounce, so that we could rerecord with a measuring stick. Using the camera, we could slow the video down on replay to a frame by frame view, so that we could see exactly how high it bounced.

After recording ten of these trials from different heights, we went to the whiteboard, where we wrote down our results for the class, as well as graphing them. We found the slope with the equation

bounces=.9(drop)+1

And then the challenge. Could we turn our data into a reasonable prediction for a 5m drop from the FPAC Balcony. Logic would say "just insert numbers into the slope equation and you will get a prediction," right? But I chose a different approach. A 5m drop is equal to 500cm. During our testing, we dropped a ball from 220cm, and got a bounce back of 144cm. We also dropped from 60cm, with a bounce of 53cm. So I took the bounce of 144cm, and multiplied it by 2, and then added the bounce of 53cm, for a total of 341cm bounce on an accumulated bounce of 500cm. Then, I noticed a pattern. The higher the drop, the farther the bounce height was from the drop height. For example, there was a difference of 76cm between the 220cm drop height and the 144cm bounce height. So I tried to estimate for that pattern and estimated around 335cm for the bounce height on a 500cm drop.

Turns out I overthought that a little. The bounce was actually 360cm, so the initial estimate would have been fine, but both of my estimates were closer than the slope formula.