Engineered Sports

Student Worksheet:
You are the Engineering Team!
 
Your challenge is to work as a team of aerospace engineers meeting to determine if adding dimples to airplane wings would improve fuel efficiency for jetliners.  You'll need to answer a few questions as a group, and share your analysis with other teams of "engineers" in your classroom.

1. Do you think a smooth ball or a dimpled ball would experience less air friction when flying through the air?  Why?  

2. Understanding the impact of dimples on a golf ball, should our engineering team recommend adding dimples to the wings of airplanes?  Write an argument for or against this idea which you will present to your class.  

3. Give two examples of how engineering has impacted the design of other sport equipment.  Include specific examples of how two pieces of sport equipment have physically changed in the past ten years as a result of engineering.

      Engineered Sports

Student Worksheet: Bounce Test

You are a team of engineers who have been given the challenge of evaluating and explaining the physics of bouncing balls of different varieties.  

 Research/Preparation Phase

1. Review the various Student Reference Sheets related to bounce physics.  

 Predicting as a Team

1. Your team has been provided with several different types of balls and a measuring tape or stick.  You'll drop each ball from the four feet in the air and determine how high a bounce you expect from each type of ball.  Use the chart below or draw your own if you have different ball types to predict what you think will happen. You'll use this same chart later on to record the actual bounce of each ball.  

Ball Type	Predicted bounce height	Actual bounce height	

			

			

			

			

 Testing Phase
1. Try out the bounce test and record the actual bounce results in the box above. Note: one person should be in charge of dropping the ball and another responsible for measuring the height of the resulting bounce.  
 Reflection Phase
1. Complete the Reflection worksheet.
2. Present your findings to the class.  

      Engineered Sports

Student Worksheet: Bounce Test Reflection

 Use this worksheet to evaluate your team's results in the physics of bounce test:

1. How did your predictions for bounce compare with the actual bounce results?  What surprised you about your findings?

2. Explain the concepts of kinetic and potential energy as they relate to this bounce test.

3.  If there was a loss of energy, what would account for it?

4.  What do you think accounted for the difference in the bounce of the different balls?  Was it more the size?  More the materials?  More the engineering?  A combination?

      Engineered Sports

Student Worksheet: 
Bounce Test Reflection (continued)

5. Consider how sports would change if balls had different levels of bounciness. Pick a sport, and describe how three different levels of bounciness would impact the sport, its players, other equipment, and even the environment in which the sport is played.

6. What did learn about design tradeoffs (common in engineering) by answering question 5 above?