Bouncing Ball

Use the Graph section of the Bouncing Ball pages in the Student Guide to introduce students to the graphing portion of this investigation. Students can use this section as a checklist to make sure their graphs are completed correctly.

The first bullet in this section directs students to graph the drop heights and average bounce heights for each type of ball. They make point graphs for the tennis ball data and SuperBall^® data on separate sheets of Centimeter Graph Paper.

Students should choose what scale to put on their axes, but remind them that they need to use the same scale on both graphs and to leave room for extrapolation. Scaling by tens on the horizontal axis and by fives on the vertical axis will make accurate predictions possible. Figure 4 shows a sample graph for the tennis ball experiment and Figure 5 shows a sample graph for the SuperBall^® experiment.