These Human Body experiment lessons should be used with lessons about the scientific method (especially if your school does a science fair). Each experiment in the series will identify the following topics:

• Question

• Hypothesis

• Materials

• Experiment

  o Procedure

  o Control, independent, and dependent variable

• Results

• Conclusion
  When explaining an experiment to the students, constantly refer back to the

  scientific method. This will help the students understand these concepts in an applied setting. Hopefully, this will also help in their own experiment idea generation or help them correctly identify their controls and variables within an already established experiment. Another option for the human body experiment series is to teach these lessons as the students learn about the human body, specifically as a follow-up to the Great River Lesson.

Why are some people able to throw so much faster than others? What is their secret? Is it just training, or is there something else too? We would expect baseball pitchers and cricket bowlers to have giant shoulder muscles that create velocity in their throws, but we often don't see that. Instead, these athletes use their whole body, like a kinetic chain, to deliver force to the ball. Something that we do see at the highest levels of the sport that requires powerful throws is a long arm. Why? With this experiment, we want our students to look at their bodies as simple machines and see if physics influences how fast someone can throw.

Materials: 

·      A stopwatch

·      Several balls of the same size and weight

o   A softer dodgeball can be thrown against a wall safely, but a harder ball (baseball) should have someone catching the ball with a glove.

·      Pencil and paper

·      Graphing calculator (optional)

·      A tape measure

·      A large whiteboard or writing pad to record the data

Minimum Amount: This experiment can be done with as few as two people, one person to throw and the other times them, and then they switch. However, they won't have much data to compare their arm length and throwing speed. On the other hand, with many students, there will be plenty of data to see whether arm length and throwing speed are associated.

Age: Upper elementary and middle school