1. May The Force
Be With You!

2. Let’s Explore!
Each set of partners will get straws and 1 ping pong ball to share.
Your job is to try to blow the ping pong ball toward your partner’s side of the table.
Your partner’s job is to blow the ping pong ball back to your side.

3. Let’s Discuss! What did you notice?
Was there ever a time that you and your partner blew with the same amount of force and the ball didn’t move at all?
What happened the most? What happened only a little?

4. Let’s Explore!
Each set of partners will get straws and 1 golf ball to share.
Your job is to try to blow the golf ball toward your partner’s side of the table.
Your partner’s job is to blow the golf ball back to your side.

5. Let’s Discuss! What did you notice?
Was there ever a time that you and your partner blew with the same amount of force and the ball didn’t move at all?
What happened the most? What happened only a little?

6. Before We Go On... Let’s refresh our memories!
Acceleration is...a change in velocity. This means a change in speed or direction of an object.

7. Discussion – Same Balls/Different Force
When two of the same balls have different amounts of force applied to them, the ball with the most force had the most acceleration. If the mass is the same AND the force is the same, what do you think would have happened? How would we test this question out?

8. Discussion – Different Balls
When balls with different masses have the same amount of force applied to them, which has greater acceleration? Objects with greater mass require more force to accelerate. So... the ball with less mass should have had greater acceleration. Is that what happened here?

9. Discussion – Different Balls/Try to Get Them to Accelerate at the Same Rate
Were you able to do it? How? What happened?

10. What do you wonder now?
What other investigations would you like to do with the whackers? Write about them in your science notebooks.