Catapults
When you fire a ball through the air, it moves both vertically and horizontally (up and out). When you toss it upwards, you store the (moving) kinetic energy as potential energy, which transfers back to kinetic when it comes whizzing back down. If you throw it only outwards, the energy is completely lost due to friction.
The higher you pitch a ball upwards, the more energy you store in it. Instead of breaking our arms trying to toss balls into the air, let’s make a simple machine that will do it for us. This catapult uses elastic kinetic energy stored in the rubber band to launch the ball skyward.
Here’s what you need:
Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.
Well, it sounds like close to the end of the video when you launched the catapult it broke some glass.
sevy keble
My brother LOVES this. He is going to use it for his Legos/Playmoabile.
Holly Thomson:)
I made my catapult and it is AWSOME!!! now i am going to make a lego catapult.
That was cool! Do you have to use popiscle sticks for this experiment or can you use something else?
You can use any number of rigid objects – in fact, there’s a student hat wrote to me saying he’d made a larger model using old bike tires (the inner tube part that holds air) for the rubber bands, spatulas for the spoon, and large pieces of wood for the frame.