OBSERVATIONS AND EVALUATION

Observations:

We can observe that what I predicted in the hypothesis is what happened. We can see how with the increasing of the height from where the ball was thrown, the time taken of it to reach the floor increase

So we can see how the tendency line shows itself a linear function and it shows like that, because with the calculations made, we are assuming that the acceleration is a constant variable, however we can see that the real line does not trace the tendency line, and this is because I said about the air resistance, which acts differently at different heights.

This obtained results are not valid due to air resistance (effects explained latterly in the evaluation), however, we assume that this result are reliable due to the fact that we consider the environment as a vacuum.

Evaluation:

To finish with this experiment, I am going to finish with an evaluation.

I think that the experiment itself was easy to carry out, however, the way of collecting the data and the deformation of the ball and air resistance, has changed the results a little bit:

In reference to the way of collecting the data, we can say that we can find various gaps in this method, because we time the falling by eye, starting the stopwatch when the one carrying heard me telling him now, and then stopped the stopwatch when the ball reached the floor. By this process, me and my partner conclude that we did not record all the falling of the ball, because of the delay that presents the hearing of the "shouting" and the time that the human system takes to stop the stopwatch.

We can improve this by maybe using some type of technology that can improve the recording of the data, like a laser in the floor that detects when an object touch this laser.

Now, talking about the deformation of the ball, we have some issues:

We could not realize 5 trials because of the fact the balls were changing shape at the falling, so we decided that we will stay with 3 trials because if not, the results were going to vary. So because of that problem, we can observe that the shape of the object was changed along the experiment and this has altered the results due to the ball deformation, changing how the air resistance and aerodynamics mold to it.

A way of improving this issue is easy, we should have selected a type of ball that always stays the same like a plastic ball or a foam rubber ball.

In reference, to air resistance, we find one main issue:

The main spotted problem is that the obtained results are not reliable. We calculated the height from the obtained results, however, this are not valid because, if we throw a piece of paper from the same height than one of the plasticine ball, the plasticine ball would reach the floor quicker than the paper. In this way, if we try to calculate the space travelled through the space formula for linear motion (s = v₀ * t + ½ * a * t²), the height that this formula is going to represent from the time taken of the paper to reach the floor is going to be higher to the space represented by the space formula in function to the time taken for the ball to reach the floor. Also, as we know, the gravity in real life is not linear, however, the distance and the object thrown is so small, that they are not affected by this effect.

In conclusion, we had an easy experiment where we found some planning errors, however, the hypothesis is correct, due to the fact, that when the object is thrown from a higher spot (point A) is going to take more time to reach a constant height spot (point B).