Scaling Sphere
Purpose
Challenges students' volume intuition: a clear sphere holds far more tennis balls than most people estimate. Students predict how many balls (or what fraction of two buckets) will fit, then watch as nearly all 128 balls pour in — demonstrating that volume scales as the cube of linear dimension.
Figure 1:
The transparent sphere holds 122 of the 128 tennis balls from two 5-gallon buckets — far more than most students estimate.
Demo Apparatus
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