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Sports Lab Light Tests: Timing Gates and a Kick Tank

Grade 8 light wave practice: explain why a timing gate misses some balls, then use kick-tank data to model how light bends and reflects at a water surface.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-PS4-2

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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 model how different materials reflect, absorb or transmit a beam of light.
Students use angle data to describe how light bends and reflects when it passes from air into water.
Students use a light model to explain a problem in a real measuring tool.

How to use

Use after introducing reflection, absorption, transmission and refraction. Before Part 1, have students sketch the gate, the beam and the reflector as a top view.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-PS4-2

Model how light and sound waves are reflected, absorbed or transmitted through different materials.

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Name Date

Sports Lab Light Tests: Timing Gates and a Kick Tank

Model how balls and water reflect, absorb, transmit and bend light.

Part 1: The timing gate and the balls

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

A Morning in the Performance Lab

1The Westbrook Recreation Center has a sports performance lab where coaches measure balls, bats and runners. Lab technician Ms. Bettina Marquez-Holt invited two eighth graders, Teagan Okwu and Rafael Dimitrov, to help with two problems that both turned out to be about light. She asked them to treat each problem like a real investigation: test one thing at a time, measure carefully and explain every result with a model of how light behaves.

2The first problem was the lab's timing gate, which clocks how fast a ball crosses a lane. A box on one side of the lane holds a small lamp and a light detector. The lamp shines a narrow beam across the lane to a reflector on a post. When nothing is in the way, the beam bounces off the reflector and comes straight back to the detector. When an object blocks the light coming back, the gate clicks. Coaches had noticed that the gate sometimes missed balls completely.

3Teagan held each ball in the beam while Rafael used a light meter to measure how much of the beam the ball reflected, absorbed and transmitted. Then they rolled each ball through the gate 10 times. In a dark room, Rafael also shone a flashlight on each ball. The white softball glowed evenly when he looked from any side. The chrome-coated ball showed one tiny, very bright spot that moved whenever he moved his head.

4The second problem came from the swim coaches. They film swimmers' kicks in a glass-sided kick tank and wanted to know where to put the camera. Teagan shone a narrow flashlight beam down onto the still water at five angles, each measured from a line straight down into the water. A protractor printed on the glass let her read the beam's angle in the water. A light meter showed what percent of the beam bounced off the surface instead of entering the water.

5While they worked, a coach dropped a stopwatch into the tank. It landed on the bottom near the far side. When she reached in at a slant toward where she saw it, her hand landed a little short of the watch.