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Ball Launcher Lab: How Mass and Speed Change Kinetic Energy

Grade 8 kinetic energy practice: analyze a ramp-and-cup investigation with a bar graph and tables to separate the effects of mass and speed.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-PS3-1

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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, Circle the answer, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use a graph and tables to describe how kinetic energy depends on mass when speed stays the same.
Students use data to show that kinetic energy grows with the square of speed.
Students judge whether the cup's slide distance is a good measure of kinetic energy.

How to use

Read the lab notes together and check that students can find each variable. A grooved ruler, a few balls and a paper cup let the class try Experiment 2 themselves.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-PS3-1

Use graphs and tables to show how kinetic energy depends on an object's mass and its speed.

Preview

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Ball Launcher Lab: How Mass and Speed Change Kinetic Energy

Use a graph and tables from a ramp-and-cup investigation.

Experiment 1: Changing the mass

Read the lab notes. Then use Table 1 and the bar graph to answer the questions.

A Ramp, a Paper Cup and a Slow-Motion Camera

For a physical science project, eighth graders Anouk Ferraro and Tevita Hale investigated kinetic energy, the energy an object has because it is moving. They built a launcher from a grooved wooden track about 1 m long. One end rested on a stack of books, and the other end met a smooth tabletop. Just past the bottom of the track, a light paper cup lay on its side with its open end facing the track. A ball rolling off the track went into the cup and pushed it along the table until friction stopped it.

Tevita filmed each roll in slow motion as the ball crossed a 20 cm strip of tape just before the cup. Dividing the distance by the time gave the ball's speed in meters per second (m/s). To find kinetic energy, the students used the formula KE = ½ × m × v², where m is the mass and v is the speed. With the mass in grams, the formula gives the energy in millijoules (mJ). One millijoule is one thousandth of a joule.

In Experiment 1, they rolled four balls with different masses: wood, glass, aluminum and steel. They released every ball from the same mark on the track, and each one crossed the tape at about 2.0 m/s. In Experiment 2, they used only the glass ball and released it from four different marks, from low on the track to high, so that it crossed the tape at four different speeds.

In both experiments they used the same cup and the same tabletop, set the cup in the same spot each time and ran three trials for every setup. They measured how far the cup slid and recorded the average of the three trials.

At the end, Tevita wrote this conclusion in their notebook: "A heavier ball at the same speed pushed the cup farther. Doubling the speed doubled the distance the cup slid. The steel ball moved fastest down the ramp because it was heaviest. Speed had a bigger effect on kinetic energy than mass did. The cup slid farther when the ball had more kinetic energy."