Investigation " How the Temperature of a Squash Ball affects the Bounce

Procedure:

1. Firstly set up all the necessary equipment and then pour water from the tap in the kettle and switch on the kettle so that the water begins to boil.
2. After that put the squash ball into the beaker filled with water using the tongs.  Make sure to start the stopwatch at the moment the ball goes into the water.  Then stop the stopwatch after 1 minute and take the squash ball out of the beaker, using the tongs.
3. Next go to the wall as quickly as possible (so that the temperature of the squash ball does not change) and place the meter stick against the wall, then get ready to start the stopwatch and one person should sit on the floor to see how high the squash ball bounced and also hold the meter stick steadily.  After the ball bounced make sure to immediately stop the stopwatch.
4. Then pour some of the hot water into a beaker and add some water from the tap to reduce the water temperature to 30ºC.  Measure the temperature of the water using a thermometer to make sure the temperature is exactly 30ºC.
5. After that go to the mall and continue the same procedure as in Step 3.  Then after completing the same procedure for 3 temperatures, add the results for the amount of time taken together and then divide the number by three to figure out the average time taken for the squash ball to bounce. (Take the average time because the time taken for the ball to drop to the floor should always be the same).
6. Once the average time has been calculated, continue the experiment and just record the results for the height that the squash ball bounced.

Data:

To calculate the speed of the squash ball the calculation is speed = distance
                                                                          time

I then took the height that the squash ball bounced and divided it buy the average time (0.85 seconds).

Speed = 6cm
          0.85s

           = 7.058823…

I then rounded the number up to two decimal place which then gave me the final answer of 7.06cm/s. I did the same calculations for all of the results and collected the following results:

Results:

Conclusion:

In conclusion my hypothesis which was “The higher the temperature of the squash ball then the higher the bounce which means that the speed of the bounce increased” was proved by the results above because when the temperature was 60ºC the squash ball bounced 17.4cm and the speed of the squash ball was 20.47cm/s whereas when the temperature was 30ºC the squash ball only bounced 6.5cm and the speed of the squash ball was 7.64cm/s.  This is an example which shows that the temperature of the squash ball does affect the bounce and the speed.  

If I was to do this experiment again then I would make the experiment more accurate by repeating the experiment for each temperature several times and then take the average so that my results would be more accurate.