When you drop a ball, it bounces back up, but not to its starting height. But what happens if you drop a ball on top of a ball on top of a ball? Physics Girl stacked a golf ball on top of a bouncy ball on top of a basketball. When she dropped the whole stack at once, the basketball and bouncy ball rocketed the golf ball 28 feet up into the sky. That’s more than 8 times the height the golf ball started from!
Wee ones: Find a ball of any size. Drop it without throwing it down, and see how high it bounces. Does it bounce as high as your hand?
Little kids: If 3 friends each drop a stack of 3 balls, how many bouncing balls is that? Bonus: If each story of a building is 10 feet tall and you stand on the roof of a 2-story house, does that golf ball bouncing to 28 feet stop above or below you?
Big kids: If this stack made the golf ball fly 8 times its starting height, how high would the golf ball fly if a stack was dropped from a 20-foot-tall diving board? (Onto the pavement, not into the pool!) Bonus: What if you could bounce 8 times your height? How high would that be in feet and inches?
Answers:
Wee ones: You can try any ball – a rubber ball, soccer ball, tennis ball – but no matter how bouncy it is, it will not bounce to the full starting height.
Little kids: 9 balls. Bonus: It will bounce higher than you, since you will be just 20 feet above the ground.
Big kids: 160 feet. Bonus: Different for everyone…You can either multiply the feet and inches each by 8 separately and then figure out the extra feet, or you can take the total in inches and multiply that by 8. A neat shortcut: you double the number, then double again, then double it one more time, because 2 x 2 x 2 = 8.
