18 May 2010

Year 8 students from Freebrough’s Science Club have been finding out the force with which they can strike a football.

Andrew, Charlotte, Connor, Josh, Ryan and Steven made their way into the East Stand concourse of the Riverside Stadium to carry out the experiment.

How did they do it?

1. Firstly they measured a distance from the wall, recorded the distance and marked the spot where the ball was to be struck from.
2. Secondly, using a portable microphone they recorded the sound of the their foot striking the ball and the ball striking the wall.
3. After that they imported the sound recording into Adobe Audition, one of our audio editing programmes and accurately measured the time between the two sounds.
4. Next, they calculated the acceleration of the ball from one of the equations of motion.
5. Finally they measured the mass of the ball and were able to calculate the striking force in Newtons.

They young scientists then produced an audio podcast or ‘SciCast’ as a way of presenting their findings.

Here’s the SciCast

Download or listen below

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