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Battle Ropes and Stinging Bats: Wave Size and Wave Energy

Grade 8 waves practice: use battle rope and bat vibration data from a sports lab to find frequency and wavelength and relate amplitude to wave energy.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-PS4-1

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
11 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 8
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students find frequency and wavelength from rope wave measurements and use wave speed = frequency × wavelength.
Students use data to show that a wave's energy grows with the square of its amplitude.
Students explain how a drop in amplitude along a rope changes the energy the wave carries.

How to use

Show a short clip or a quick demo of a rope wave first, and label a crest, the resting line and one wavelength. Calculators help with the wave speed and energy questions.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-PS4-1

Use math to describe how a wave's amplitude relates to the energy it carries, and read wavelength and frequency.

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Name Date

Battle Ropes and Stinging Bats: Wave Size and Wave Energy

Use sports lab data to find frequency and wavelength and to connect a wave's amplitude to its energy.

Test 1: Rope wave settings

Read the lab notes and study Table 1. Then answer the questions.

Lab Notes: Waves You Can Feel

1The sports science lab at the Fairmont Recreation Center measures balls, bats and runners, and this month eighth grader Dario Kowalczyk is helping the lab's coach, Ms. Hollis Adeyemi-Strand. Their first project is the battle rope, a heavy rope 15 m long whose far end loops around an anchor post. An athlete grips the near end and swings it up and down, sending waves along the rope. Each piece of rope moves up and down as a wave passes, but the rope itself stays in place; what travels to the anchor is the wave and the energy it carries.

2A camera films the rope from the side in front of a wall marked every 0.5 m. From the video, Dario measures the amplitude, the distance from the rope's resting line up to a crest, and the wavelength, the distance from one crest to the next. To find the frequency, he counts the crests that pass a tape mark 5 m from the athlete in 10 s and divides by 10. Coach Adeyemi-Strand reminded him that wave speed = frequency × wavelength.

3In Test 1, athlete Kalinda Brightwater tried three ways of swinging the rope. Table 1 shows the results. In a separate trial she sent a few big waves and then a few small waves; both kinds took about 2.5 s to travel the 15 m to the anchor.

4In Test 2, Kalinda swung the rope at 2 Hz. Clip-on motion sensors at 1 m, 5 m and 9 m from her hands measured the amplitude and how much energy the wave carried past each spot each second. The waves grew smaller as they traveled, because some energy went into rubbing the rope against the floor and pushing the air.

5The lab also taped a small vibration sensor to the handle of an aluminum baseball bat. When a pitched ball hits a bat away from its sweet spot, the bat shakes, and a vibration wave runs through it to the batter's hands, which can sting. In every hit, the handle shook about 170 times each second. Table 3 shows how far the handle moved from its resting position.