Hi Jessica,
It sounds like it worked well for your class just like it worked well for us. The graphs are interesting because they don't all follow a predictable pattern and each graph poses some interesting questions. I'd be interested in how closely each student's graph correlates with the class average or the group as a whole? Where did the drop at 100cm go? Do all graphs make sense and tell the correct story of the data? Thanks again for presenting at UMASS.

Hello Jessica,
I enjoyed performing this experiment during our October meeting. An adaptation of this lab could involve modeling impact craters using a basin of flour with a thin coating of dark cocoa on top. My eighth grade students drop marbles from four different heights (50cm, 100cm, 150cm, and 200cm), recording the diameter of each crater in mm. They also drop a few different sizes of rocks into the basin (part 2 of the activity), keeping the drop height constant. Both sets of data could easily be recorded and graphed in Excel. Thank you for the idea!