3rd - 5th Grade Session 2: Field Goal! The Science Behind a Perfect Football Kick

In this session our scientists studied the science of projectile motion and it's applications to kicking a football. First we discussed how projectile motion is involved in throwing, kicking, and punting a football and how professional players such as quarterbacks and kickers need to have a good understanding of how a football moves through the air in order to help them win games.  We then talked about what factors affect a kick such as distance from goalposts, wind, and amount of force/energy used when kicking the football.

We focused on distance in particular for this experiment.  The question that was raised was: How does changing the distance from the goalposts affect the accuracy of a field goal kick?  After reviewing what a hypothesis is (an educated guess) students discussed what their hypothesis was for this experiment.  Some students thought that increasing the distance would not matter, being that the main factor could be weather conditions.  Other students thought by decreasing the distance then the kicker would have a better chance of scoring a field goal.  In this particular experiment, a constructed sling shot represented the kicker, a meter stick was used to represent the football field (students measured distances in centimeters instead of inches), and two rulers attached to two cups represented the goalposts.

The first part of the experiment was to build the sling shot.  Students had to work together in pairs to construct a sling shot with the given materials and tools.  This part of the experiment required some engineering!

After the sling shots were constructed, the students set up the rest of the experiment and began to test their hypothesis by shooting a ball using the sling shot from different distances and recording their observations on a data table.  As a safety precaution all scientists wore goggles.

After testing out their hypotheses, students got busy analyzing their data by computing the field goal percentages for each "kick" from the different distances.  The percentages were calculated by using the following formula: (Math to the rescue!)

Field Goal Percentage = Number of successful field goals x 100

                                      Number of field goal attempts

With their partners, our young scientists made some conclusions based on their analysis.  In most cases, students observed that the less distance between the "kick" and the goalposts the more likely a "field goal" was made.  In some cases, students observed that the way the sling shot was constructed made a huge difference in terms of the force/energy used for the "kick" thus affecting the accuracy of the kick.

I then asked the scientists to think about something that they would change if they were going to do this experiment again. Some suggested we would get more accurate results if the wind factor was involved. Others thought their sling shots could have more improvements in their design.

We closed with going back to how professional football kickers and punters use math and science to achieve the best kick and how the human factor (being human) makes a difference in terms of achieving a successful kick.