Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

For my group's experiment, we would like to test the bounciness of tennis balls on different types of tennis courts. Unfortunately, we must use five different levels of the independent variable, and it is very hard to find different tennis courts in my area. My teacher said that we could use different surfaces, instead of only tennis courts (i.e. asphalt, dirt, concrete). My questions is do you think it would be more logical to do some types or tennis courts (hard court, clay court) and some everyday surfaces (concrete, asphalt, dirt) or should we just do all everyday surfaces (carpet, grass, and the other three mentioned). We were looking for advice on this and wondering if you have any other suggestions on other materials. Thank you!

***another thing to note is if we did do some tennis courts, we could relate it to the effect it has on knee injuries (shock absorbency)

Hi sophiamarcotty,

A tennis ball bounce depends on the hardness of the surface. So you should be able to conduct your experiment with several hard and soft “everyday” surfaces.

You could have one surface that is harder than any tennis court (concrete) and one that is softer (carpet). That way you know that tennis court surfaces are within the range of your test surfaces, and that the bounce on a court will be somewhere between your test extremes.

There is a project on this site that seems similar to yours. You may want to take a look to see if you can modify it to suit your interests:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ml#summary


I hope this helps. Please post again if you have more questions.

A. Norman