This past week my family and I did our first sports related science experiment. Here's the question. How far can you jump? Then, can you jump farther from a standing position or with a running start? How big of a difference is it if you have a running start? As parents we all know that you can jump farther with a running jump, but my wife, both of my kids, and I did a few jumps and obtained data to verify our predictions. This is an easy, but fun experiment to do with your kids and all it requires is a measuring device of some kind. We used a 25 foot tape measure.
If you're a regular reader of this blog then you are well aware of my nerdness. So as you can guess, simply jumping was not good enough for me. I graphed our results in Excel!
You can see that we all jumped farther when we had a 1 step running jump. What was a bit surprising is that our jump distances did not increase beyond a 1 step running jump. They basically leveled out after that. Interesting!
So there you go. A very simple experiment that you can do with your kids. Have fun!
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