The second major project our STEM class worked on this year was our Physics of Sports Video. In this video we demonstrated our knowledge of physics by applying it to a sport. My group chose air hockey as our sport. In our video we showed off how much we know and how to apply it to air hockey. Enjoy!
For this project I worked with Kenny Blum and Conrad Walas. We chose air hockey because we wanted to learn about the physics of air hockey. We used Conrad's Uncle Mark and Aunt Biggi's air hockey table. Big thanks to them!
For the physics part of this project we started with friction. There is actually no friction between the puck and the air hockey table. There IS a little bit of friction when the puck hits the sides of the table. This makes the puck move just a bit slower due to the friction on the sides. Since there is no friction the puck continues to move at a constant speed.
Now for the techniques on how to hit the puck. If you hit the puck too slow it will obviously be blocked. Anything less than a velocity of 1 meter per second could be blocked. How ever, if the puck moves faster than 2 meters per second it will be harder to block so it gives you the perfect opportunity to try and score. When Kenny hits the puck potential energy converts into kinetic energy. The formula we used for finding kinetic energy was KE=1/2mV (kinetic energy= 1/2 x mass x velocity). For the information we gathered we plugged the following information into this equation. KE= 1/2(0.02kg)(4.4054). We got 0.044J. J stands for Joules.
We also calculated force with the equation mV=Ft (mass x velocity= force x time). We plugged in 0.02kg(4.4054)= F(0.37 seconds). The next step was 0.088= F(0.37s). The force was 0.238 Newtons.
This project gave me a great opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge of physics and apply it to this sport. I learned several new formulas and got to do some filming along the way. It was super fun to work with my two partners Kenny and Conrad and the video turned out way better than we expected. I learned so much through this project.