All boys. All boarding. Grades 9-12.
News Detail
Seniors Rich Lane and Mike Johnson take first place at Virginia Junior Academy of Science
Paper and talk, "Range of a pitched baseball as a function of spin" takes top award
An ingenious experiment won seniors Rich Lane and Mike Johnson the top physics award at last week's Virginia Junior Academy of Science meeting.
In a paper and presentation titled "Range of a pitched baseball as a function of spin," the students confirmed the accuracy of a formula developed in 1986 by Tulane professors R. G. Watts and S. Baroni. This formula, which describes the distance a baseball will travel in terms of its rate of spin, had not previously been tested with any thoroughness. To do so involved a number of difficulties, as to confirm the equation one needed to measure a number of variables simultaneously: the speed at which the ball was traveling, the rate at which it was spinning, and the distance that the ball would fly under real-world conditions.
To capture this data, Lane and Johnson set up a pitching machine, a high-speed camera, and a strobe light in the Barbee Gym. After turning out all the lights, they triggered the pitching machine to throw balls over the strobe light, which allowed them to capture multiple, successive images of the ball in a single photograph as it was flying swiftly through the air. When it hit the ground, they recorded the distance it had traveled.
After spending two days configuring this setup and recording data, Johnson and Lane imported the photographs into an image editing program and altered the colors so that the baseball's seams were easier to see. They then could measure its rate of rotation and the distance it had traveled between the different images of the ball, which had been created lit by the strobe light at a constant interval.
The paper, which they presented at Woodberry's own Physics Colloquium in late April, received first prize in the physics category.
Back
In a paper and presentation titled "Range of a pitched baseball as a function of spin," the students confirmed the accuracy of a formula developed in 1986 by Tulane professors R. G. Watts and S. Baroni. This formula, which describes the distance a baseball will travel in terms of its rate of spin, had not previously been tested with any thoroughness. To do so involved a number of difficulties, as to confirm the equation one needed to measure a number of variables simultaneously: the speed at which the ball was traveling, the rate at which it was spinning, and the distance that the ball would fly under real-world conditions.
To capture this data, Lane and Johnson set up a pitching machine, a high-speed camera, and a strobe light in the Barbee Gym. After turning out all the lights, they triggered the pitching machine to throw balls over the strobe light, which allowed them to capture multiple, successive images of the ball in a single photograph as it was flying swiftly through the air. When it hit the ground, they recorded the distance it had traveled.
After spending two days configuring this setup and recording data, Johnson and Lane imported the photographs into an image editing program and altered the colors so that the baseball's seams were easier to see. They then could measure its rate of rotation and the distance it had traveled between the different images of the ball, which had been created lit by the strobe light at a constant interval.
The paper, which they presented at Woodberry's own Physics Colloquium in late April, received first prize in the physics category.
Woodberry Forest School is an exceptional private school community for high school boys in grades nine through twelve. It is one of the top boarding schools in the United States and one of the only all-boys, all-boarding schools in the country.
Explore & Resources
Woodberry Forest admits students of any race, color, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, and national or ethnic origin to all of the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, or national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic or other school-administered programs. The school is authorized under federal law to enroll nonimmigrant students.