Reverse Engineering: Ball Bounce Experiment
Many of today's popular sports, like soccer, basketball, and tennis, involve using balls, but each ball is unique in its own way. These balls are carefully created with special features to make playing each sport a fun and exciting experience. Students explore the concept of reverse engineering to understand how and why engineers use it. Then, students investigate how different balls bounce by dropping them from various heights and create graphs to show their findings. Through their investigation and analysis, they are able to reverse-engineer different characteristics of several types of balls.
Students investigate balls and their bounceCopyright Microsoft Corporation, 1983-2001
Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a product, system, or piece of technology to understand how it works, its design principles, and its components. This is done by dissecting, deconstructing, and examining the object of interest in order to gain insights into its inner workings, structure, and functionality. Materials scientists and engineers identify the properties of many different materials and recommend their best uses. This activity demonstrates reverse engineering, in which the properties of finished products are determined by performing tests on the products.
After this activity, students should know:
- How to run an experiment.
- How to collect data.
- How to present data.
- How to interpret graphs.
- How to graph results.
- Teamwork.
- What reverse engineering is.