Hula hoop dreams laboratory 14

 Laboratory 14 was the first time with actual hula hoops.

Equipment included a variety of hoops. The green hoop would prove to be smaller than the other commercial grade hoops. The homemade hoops did not work as well. 

In the spirit of toroidal objects.

Lailani with Adriann timing

Derisalyn

Marcia

Mercedes

Lailani

In the morning session, Lailani, Derisalyn, and Marcia would prove adept with the hoops and taught me a new circular hip motion that worked much better than my back and forth motion. 

Cynthia turned in a slightly higher time that some of other students.

Introduction

I did lead off the 8:00 class with a few hoop videos. I did not find any I particularly liked or found more useful than others. 

Part one was determining whether the period was the same for different hoopers. At this point I had not realized that the green hoop was about 10 cm smaller in diameter. 

Part two looked at rotation period in seconds versus diameter in centimeters. Ten rotations were timed where one rotation is as a child would count rotations, not actual hoop circumference rotations which is a more complex "gear ratio" problem.

Data, detail view

Johannes

Destiny Grace

To get down to small diameters various objects were used including decorative duck tape.

A flying ring and juggling rings provided more diameters at the small end. 

The homemade loops were too flexible and had to be vertically rotated. 

Faithlyn and Destiny Grace's data

Herna and Keiko-Lalii's data

Herna hunts for a pattern in the data

My sincere thanks to Caroline Kocel for her extraordinary efforts to get the commercial grade hoops to Micronesia and to the class. We had a lot of fun doing the laboratory and my only regret was that she could not be with us to enjoy a day that continued to demonstrate science is fun!