Projectile motion: Basketball trajectory

This is an interactive Geogebra page. I use it for teaching CAIE Further Mechanics.

You can run this page in a browser by clicking here or you can download the file if you want to.

Clicking on the “Start” button will start the animation of the ball’s motion.

You can adjust the sliders to change the initial speed or the value of g.
Say, if you want to model playing basketball on Mars, then g=3.8 ish.

You can click-and-drag the pink spot to change the angle of projection.
You can click-and-drag the blue spot to move the basket.

Clicking on the “Trajectory” and “Axes” check-boxes will reveal the trajectory formula and the axes. Then you can adjust the initial speed and direction and the trajectory formula will change in real time.

You might want to use it as a game to the finish the lesson preceding your introduction of the trajectory formula.

You might want to show the class what computer games used to look like in the old days: Scorched Earth at DOS Games Online
If you haven’t played Scorched Earth before, you have to chuck bombs at each other, and the bombs fall with a parabolic trajectory.