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Student project highlights

Students made movies of varius types of jumps with and without shoes on and calculated the time spent in the top 25% of the jump. Many other things can be analyzed with this data if , for example, you know the person's mass.

Students who have played football are often intrigued with the idea of testing momentum conservation during collisions between players. This is obviously difficult to do since players are often in contact with the ground during collisions and do not form an isolated system. Three students identified a video segment showing midair collision between a wide receiver leaping a pass and a defender. Three of these frames are shown in Figure (5). Ideally the plane of motion of the players should be perpendicular to the camera axis. In this case the players are moving toward the camera and appear to grow larger in each frame. The students used the VideoPoint frame-by-frame rescaling feature and many hours of time to locate the center of mass of each player relative to a fixed point on the field. They determined the masses of the players using professional football statistics and estimated the mass of their football gear based on information from a football supply catalog posted on the web. They found that the x-components of momenta before and after collision were the same within about 3% (with p_ix = -7.1×104 kg•m/s and p_fx = -7.3×104 kg•m/s). This is an unusually good result considering that the there is at least a 1 or 2% uncertainty inherent in any position location used to locate body parts of each player and to rescale on each frame.