In this project my group, Ryan, Peter, and I worked together to create a video explaining the physics of baseball to help students at San Marin. The first step in this project was to create a story board and script. After we did this, we went to the baseball field to film our video. We were constantly pausing the videos we took and putting them in slow motion so we could figure out the force and velocity. We took many videos so we could have a wide selection to choose the best ones. We edited our video, made an intro, an outro, added background music, and created voice overs. Each group in our class showed our videos to the class so we could get feedback on it so we could improve them. A lot of our audio was messed up for some reason and we needed better transitions between clips. After fixing these, we had a good and completed video.
In this project we used many different physics concepts in our video.
Force of impact: The force of impact on an object is the amount of force dealt on that object by another object. The force of impact is calculated by using the equation mv = Ft. When the baseball bat hits the baseball it has a certain amount of impact on the ball.
Momentum: Momentum is the tendency of a moving object to keep moving. The equation for momentum is to multiply the mass of an object by it's velocity. The baseball bats carry a certain amount of momentum.
Impulse: Impulse is how long and how forcefully something (usually an object) is pushed. Impulse is calculated by multiplying force by time. The bat hits the baseball with a certain amount of impulse.
Horizontal velocity: Horizontal velocity is the rate in which an object moves along a vertical plane. Horizontal velocity is calculated by dividing the horizontal distance by the time an object is in the air. The ball flies at a certain horizontal velocity.
Vertical velocity: Vertical velocity is the rate in which an object moves along a vertical plane. Vertical velocity is calculated by multiplying the acceleration due to gravity by the time an object is in the air. The ball flies at a certain vertical velocity.
Total Velocity: Total velocity is the total velocity (literally) in which an object is moving at. This is calculated using vector addition. You can add horizontal and vertical velocity by making a right triangle then taking the hypotenuse as the total velocity. The ball flies at a certain total velocity.
Reflection:
I enjoyed working on the project. My team members all got along well most of the time although we had a few arguments about what to do, but we settled them quickly and quietly. Ryan did all of the physics and equations of the video, which I wouldn't be able to do, and also did some voice overs. Peter was the one in our video hitting the baseball over and over again, and also did a few voice overs. I'm the one who did all the filming and did part of the video editing. Since I'm not the best at physics and solving all those different equations, I would've liked more part on the physics of the video, so I could learn and improve more for future projects. I also think I could've thought of more ideas to improve our video even more. Other then that, I think I did fairly well on our project.