bouncing balls experiment

The question:
Which ball bounces higher on which surface?
Backround research:
http://www.ehow.com/about_6691030_rubber-balls-bounce_.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Ball
Hypothesis: we think that the tennis ball will bounce the highest on a carpet floor and the ping pong ball on the table.
Experiment:
In this experiment we tested 4 times how high 5 balls would bounce on a carpet and on a table. We used: a pingpong ball, a tennis ball, a foam baseball, an orange plastic ball,and a golfball.

What is a Variable?

A "variable" is a word for a quantity or condition that can change. Variables can be continuous or they can be discrete. Continuous variables can have many values . For example, time is continuous and can have many values. Plant growth, amount of sunlight or amount of water flowing are all continuous variables. Discrete variables are ones that have a few, distinct values. Something can be either on or off, present or absent, or have only several countable possibilities. A kitchen light can be on or off or a person may have blue, brown, green or hazel eyes.

Independent Variable

An independent variable is a variable that you can control. One way to explain it to a child is that it is the variable that the child can change during the experiment. For example, in an experiment on the effect of light on plant growth, the child can control how much light a plant receives. He can put one plant near a window and another plant in a dark closet.

Dependent Variable

A dependent variable is the variable that you observe and measure. You have no control over the dependent variable; you want to observe what happens to the dependent variable when you change the independent variable. For example, if the child is testing the effects of light on plant growth, how much the plant grows after some period of time would be the dependent variable. The child can measure how much the plant in the closet grows relative to how much the plant near the window grows. The independent variable is how high we drop it. The dependent varible is how high it bounces. One problem we had is when the ball rolled away or bounced of the person holding the rulers fingers. First we set up the experiment then we got the balls. Next we droppred the balls on certain places.
  Data:






Observations:
In our experiment I observed that the balls bounced better on a table than a carpet. If there had been something like a paper, a coat, or a binder it would have affected the results of the experiment.
Conclusion:
In our experiment the ping pong ball avereged the highest on the table and the tennis ball avereged the highest on the floor. Our hypothesis was very correct.