Procedures

     The idea of the experiment was to drop several water balloons from a height sufficient enough to create a splash, and then capture the water that splashes from the point of impact in a row of tuna cans. This would allow us to answer our question, because then we would be able to find the amount of water in the tuna cans and get good data. We began by finding a height that we could drop the water balloons from, one that would be equal every time. After a few test trials, we decided that 3 meters would be a good height.

     Next we started lining up tuna cans one foot from the impact point. We wanted to give a little bit of room from the impact points so that when dropping the water balloons we didn’t hit the tuna cans. Unfortunately, we had to drop the balloons manually, so that might have hindered our data. We decided to use tuna cans because they were low to the ground and they were small and compact, so that we could catch the most amount of water possible, and our data could be the most accurate.

     After everything was setup, our experiment looked like this:

     Once we were done, we had to mass the items. We had previously massed the tuna cans and found that they were 14.2 grams, and we also had massed the balloons to discover their average mass of .369 kg. Afterwards, we massed each can (with water) and subtracted the mass of the can to find the mass of the water inside. Once done with that, we made a graph to show how well our data worked, trying to prove that the farther the splash goes outward, less water will be present.