Hello again!
This is part two of a three part series, introducing our projects in a bit more detail. If you haven't already, you can read part one, which introduced the dock blocks. Today, I'm going to introduce an educational aid we're calling the bouncy ball.
The bouncy ball is an aid to understanding basic physical principals. Force, acceleration, inertia, kinetic and potential energy--these aren't the most intuitive concepts, but the more concretely you demonstrate them the more intuitive they become. The bouncy ball aims to do just that concretizing, by tying these physical laws to visual display and tactile games. With an acceleromter connected to LEDs or other visual stimuli, games centered around tossing or dropping the ball can illustrate the strength of an impact, the acceleration the ball experiences in flight, and other concepts.
Jeff Crews, who provided the fabrication for the Dock Blocks, has whipped up a prototype for this out of the most unassuming of objects--a dog's ball. It's actually sort of ideal--a dog toy is cheap, and sourceable at any big box store or pet store. LEDs embedded in clear silicone in holes in the ball provide the visual display. The accelerometer--a key piece of this assembly--is a MMA7455L.
The ball is cut along open along one orbital plane to allow the placement of the inner electronics. An O-Ring, placed around a perpendicular orbital groove, holds the halves back together, so that it can continue to bounce. Pleasanty, it's a very simple construction, easy for someone to put together with a little bit of work. As Crews pointed out, if you can't get a ball with conveniently placed holes, you can easily drill or cut out your own.
We're going to experiment with some other ball enclosures, but the basic construction is unlikely to change.
Check back again soon--we'll have part three up describing the last of our projects: the Piano Player.