On Thursday the 9th of March we went to see ‘Sports Engineering – engineer your success’ a show by Mark Langtry aka ‘Mark the Science Guy’. It was on in the Alice Perry Engineering building in the University of Galway. It was great fun and very interesting. Ryan in 5th class has written an account of the day below.

Mark The Science Guy

An article by Ryan (5^th class)

Today my class met Mark The Science Guy IN PERSON which was pretty cool!  He was teaching us about engineering and sports. He talked to us about Physics, Forces and Aerodynamics.

Firstly he showed us a cannon which was… AN AIR CANNON and he shot me with air:]. Then a girl volunteered to get shot with air and we could see her hair move – first he used the air cannon normally but then he put smoke into it with his handy smoke machine. The special thing about him using the smoke was that we could see how the air moved when he shot it. It shot out little smoke donuts which I thought was awesome.

Next he showed us was a volleyball and a leaf blower, he proceeded to make the volleyball float using the leaf blower. At first he made it float above the blower but then he pushed it to the side and it started to spin which was really cool. He explained that as the air flowed around the ball it stuck to it and that was why it didn’t fall when he blew it to the side. He then showed us a video of something called the ‘Magnus Effect’ which is basically where you kick the football and it spins in the air and the really cool thing about this was that it would curl in MIDAIR which I found impossible to believe until I saw it happen. He showed us videos of soccer players using the Magnus effect to score goals. We also learned that when a ball is kicked so it doesn’t spin, it goes straight forward but is then deflected in an unpredictable way and that this is called a ‘Knuckle Ball.’

Mark also showed us how engineers make the World Cup ball every 4 years. Before the engineers can let the players use the ball they have to put it through 7 different tests. The 7 tests are;

Is it Round? Is it Water-Proof? Can it Rebound well? Are the Aerodynamics good?

What’s the Weight? What’s the Air Pressure? How good is it at Bouncing?

Then he showed us a cool little gizmo called a Speed Radar which could record the speed of a ball after it’s kicked so some volunteers got to kick a ball into a goal where the Speed Radar could test it’s speed.  One of my friends kicked it at a whopping 60.3km/hr which was unreal!

 After that the show was finished. Overall we had a great day!

(BTW Did you know that Mark used to be a pro football player?)