Wednesday, September 4, 2013

How Far Can You Jump? Sports Science Experiment

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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