Assembly Programs: Play Ball
Miss Lauren and Miss Annie demonstrate the importance of leverage in sports equipment with the help of a volunteer.
Science and sports team up to explore the biology, physics, and engineering behind athletics. Discover why you wouldn’t play football with a hockey puck and uncover why each sport has unique equipment that utilizes friction, elasticity, and shape to its advantage. Become an athlete and reveal the science in sports while putting real sports equipment to the test.
“Play Ball” aligns with the following points of the Maryland State Voluntary Curriculum:
Skills and Processes
Grades K, 1, 2
- Seek information through reading, observation, exploration, and investigations. Explain when a science investigation is done the way it was done before, we expect to get a very similar result. (A.1bd)
- Describe and compare things in terms of number, shape, texture, size, weight, color, and motion. (C.1b)
- Practice identifying parts of things and how one part connects to and affects the other. Explain that something may not work if some of its parts are missing. Explain that when parts are put together, they can do things that they couldn’t do by themselves. (D.2bc)
- Explain that a model of something is different from the real thing but can be used to learn something about the real thing. Realize that one way to describe something is to say how it is like something else. (D.3ab)
Grades 3, 4, 5
- Gather and question data from different forms of scientific investigations which include observing what things are like or what is happening somewhere and doing experiments. Select and use appropriate tools to augment observations of objects, events, and processes explain that comparisons of data might not be fair because some conditions are not kept the same. Explain that comparisons of data might not be fair because some conditions are not kept the same. Recognize that the results of scientific investigations are seldom exactly the same, and when the differences are large, it is important to try to figure out why (A.1bcd)
- Seek better reasons for believing something than "Everybody knows that..." or “I just know” and discount such reasons when given by others. Develop explanations using knowledge possessed and evidence from observations and investigations. Offer reasons for their findings and consider reasons suggested by others. Review different explanations for the same set of observations and make more observations to resolve the differences. (B.1abc)
- Recognize that doing science involves many different kinds of work and engages men and women of all ages and backgrounds (C.1e)
- Identify factors that must be considered in any technological design- cost, safety, and what happens if the solution fails (D.1c)
- Realize that in something that consist of many parts, the parts usually influence one another. Explain that something may not work as well (or not at all) if a part is missing, broken, worn out, mismatched, or misconnected. (D.2ab)
Grade 6
- Design, analyze, or carry out simple investigations and formulate appropriate conclusions based on data obtained or provided (A.1)
- Explain how different models can be used to represent the same thing. Choosing a useful model is one of the instances in which intuition and creativity come into play in science, mathematics, and engineering. Recognize that important contributions to the advancement of science, mathematics, and technology have been made by different kinds of people, in different cultures, at different times. (C.1eg)
Physics
Grade K
- Based on observations, identify what caused the changes in an object’s motion (push, pull). (A.2b)
Grade 3
- Explain that changes in the ways objects move are caused by forces. (A.2a)
Grade 5
- Explain that changes in the motion of objects are determined by the mass of an object and the amount of the force applied to it. Observe and give examples that show changes in speed or direction of motion are caused by an interaction of forces acting on an object (friction, gravity). Observe and explain the changes in selected motion patterns using the relationship between force and mass. (A.2ab)
Chemistry
Grade 2
- Based on evidence from investigations, describe that materials are not changed by certain actions, such as reshaping or breaking into pieces and what happens to materials if placed in a freezer, etc. (B.1ab)