Investigate Bouncing Balls

This activity tests your ability to carry out an investigation.

When carrying out an investigation, the first thing we need to do is to decide what it is that you want to find out, and how best to do that. At this planning stage, it is usual to make a prediction of what you think might be the result of the investigation. The prediction may well prove to be incorrect once you've completed the experiment, but it is still important to think about the possible outcome and make some sort of a prediction based on your general and scientific knowledge.

It is very important that the investigation you plan is a fair test. This means that if you are testing different objects in different situations, you must change only one variable each time, so that you know exactly what it was that caused a different result.

Once you have completed the investigation, you need to decide how best to display the results. Would a table be useful, or a more visual display, such as a bar chart?

Finally, you need to be able to interpret the results that you have obtained and see if they support the prediction that you made at the start. At this stage, it is also a good idea to consider any changes that you would make to the investigation that might improve it.

This experiment is about bouncy balls -  measuring their bounce and how best to display and interpret those results.

Let's see what's going on.