Tennis is a popular worldwide spectator sport. It is a racket sport that can be played individually against a single opponent or between two teams of two players each. Each player uses a racket and a rubber ball covered with felt over. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society. We have a really good tennis team in San Marin.
For our second project, Sarah Teel, Ben Defilippis, Camille Obert, and I were given a task to help the San Marin's athletic program by finding the physics of a sport and explain how to improve on a certain action in that sport. For my group, we decided to explain the Physics behind the Tennis Serve. First, we started by making a story board and writing a script. Next, we took videos of Sarah's tennis serves and we recorded our voices talking about the physics of each components. Then, we put all the videos and voice recordings together and made "The Physics of Tennis Serve" video which is shown below.
How the video mentioned, there are 5 key components of a tennis serve. 1. The Ball Toss 2. The Knee Bend 3. The Acceleration of the Racket 4. The Solid Contact with the Ball 5. The Arc of the Ball For the ball toss, the ball is going from the Kinetic Energy(KE) to the Potential Energy(PE). We figured out our final potential energy by using the formula PE=mgh (mass • acceleration due to gravity • height). Using this formula, we got PE=1.70961J. Next step is the knee bend. This step is really important because it gives the maximum power out of your body and adds more momentum and more velocity to your serve. Our next calculation is the acceleration of the racket. We used a= △v/△t (change in velocity over change in time) and got the acceleration of 100m/s^2. The racket need high acceleration to get the desired velocity. Our fourth step is the solid contact with the ball. We used the equation mv=ft (mass • velocity = force • timeof impact), momentum=impulse. When we calculated, we got the force of 293.44N(Newton). When you hit the ball, it must have enough force to travel over the net. Lastly, we calculated the arc of the ball(the total velocity of the ball when it hits the ground). We calculated by finding the vertical and the horizontal velocity(velocity vectors). For the horizontal velocity, we used the equation Vhorizontal = dhorizontal/t (horizontal distance over time). And we got the horizontal velocity of 13.66m/s. Then, to find the vertical velocity, we used the equation a = vvertical/t (vertical velocity over time) and we got the vertical velocity of 7.8m/s. Finally, using the Pythagorean theorem, we found a total velocity of 15.72m/s.
-Reflection- Our second STEM project really proved to me that everything in this world involves physics. This project was really fun and interesting. I started off by knowing nothing about the tennis and now I know how to serve and how much force you need to get the ball travel over the net. I'm glad that we got to help our school's tennis team how to serve well through watching this video. I also learned more about video editing. This was my third time making a video and I discovered many new cool effects in the video editing software. I think the peak that I encountered and something that I improved in this project was the time management. It was much better in this project than the Rube Goldberg Machine. We had people working on different parts. For example, when I was editing video, rest of my group members were calculating the physics and writing a script. Also another peak could be working together as a group. My group worked really well together. We listened to each other's ideas, came up with good ideas, and we took responsible on our own work. Through our team work, we were able to finish our project in time. We didn't face many difficulties in this project but there were few things that I thought we could have done better. One of the problem(pit) that we faced was when we took the arc of the ball video; it was hard to see the tennis ball because it blended into the background(the trees). Something that I still need to improve on is explaining my ideas clearly. I also need to work on taking care of my group member's feelings. I really like how I can see the weak side of me every time we work on a project so now I can try to fix it. I think my group's video came out really well and we worked really well together.