Exercise 3: Analyzing data

A couple of goals in this lab are to quantify the energy lost by your ball between bounces, and how that changes depending on the surface material. In Exercise 2, you collected data and calculated the speed and energy of the ball after subsequent collisions on different surfaces. Now we want to compare the results from these two experiments graphically.

In Exercise 1, you may have found it difficult to calculate the exact energy of your ball without knowing its mass. Yet, if we know that the mass of the ball is constant, we can compare a parameter, K/m, that is proportional to energy (remember proportionality from Lab 1?). Therefore, since you used the same ball throughout your experiments, you can still compare the energy losses quantitatively, without ever requiring the mass of the ball.