Measurement of Gravity

After realizing that college level physics students didn't know who Einstein was, I decided to try something a little different with my next science experiment. I invited all the students who had signed up on the interested in math and science sign up sheets to an exclusive measurement of gravity.

We dropped five little water balloons, five crumpled balls of paper and five gigantic water balloons off the third floor of the library while timing how long the balloons took to fall. Splat!

We then took the data inside and graphed the results in Excel. (This was the first time many had used a computer to do calculations.) I helped derive a relationship for gravity from the time it takes to fall. We talked about who was the most accurate timer, who was the most consistent.

After two and a half hours they were still asking questions like:
"Why does everything fall down towards the Earth?"
"Why doesn't the moon fall down too?"

We're winning.