Westview’s biomechanics team, a branch of the nationwide Integrative Movement Science Team made up of various colleges and high schools, hosted a three-day workshop for Mesa Verde’s STEM-oriented eighth-grade girls, March 3-5. The workshop focused on projectile motion, a concept that engineering teacher Dawn Hester said was both easy to study and crucial to physics. Over the three days, they analyzed all aspects of the simple action of shooting a basketball.
For mentors like Maisy Cuaresma (9), the goal was to help unlock the world of physics for the incoming freshmen and help boost the percentage of girls in Westview’s engineering programs.
“There’s a lack of girls in STEM,” she said. “We [want to make] more progress and just get more girls in the classes, because for most of us girls in the biomechanics club now, we’ve been the only ones at our table. We’ve had to face the challenges of being the only girls in the [engineering classes], so we’re trying to prevent that problem with the future students to help them with their STEM journey. Most people have probably never used a force plate before or actually analyzed sports and projectile motion, [so we’ve] hopefully introduced them to things they like about STEM, and hopefully they can come back in the future and do things with their own movements and sports so that they can become a better student and athlete.”
To cover different aspects of engineering, each day’s activity examined projectile motion through a different lens.
On the first day, the group recorded their three-pointers while standing, then while sitting, and analyzed the videos to learn more about motor control and better understand the unique mechanics behind Paralympic athletes’ performances.
Dr. Jill McNitt-Gray, a biomedical engineer and University of Southern California (USC) professor in biomechanics, helped run the experiment, which she said was similar to the ones she runs every day at work.
“I work a lot with the [USA Track and Field] long jumpers and triple jumpers, and they’re basically human projectiles,” she said. “They have to run, get the momentum, and then convert some of it to launch themselves. The other groups I work with [are] USA Diving—same thing, [but] add a spring—[and] some of our Paralympic athletes. It’s the same sports, but there’s always a twist [because] you adapt so it works with the capabilities of the people that are playing. In Para[lympics], there’s a lot of engineering, [and] it always gets you thinking.”
The eighth-graders then analyzed their videos using Kinovea, a software that tracks and studies motion. According to project manager Kiana Lee (11), the first day’s success was rewarding, as the team’s preparation was extensive.
“Planning was a huge part of this project,” Lee said. “To make everything come to life, we failed over and over again and learned a lot along the way. For this particular workshop, our team also grew, with several students joining the project for the first time. Because of that, we spent a lot of time teaching each other about biomechanics and data collection. I spent a lot of time outlining how the experiment[s] would run, planning the data collection process, and thinking about how each day connected to the next. It was really inspiring to see how many students stepped up with great ideas. As someone in a leadership role, it was really inspiring to see how everyone worked together to solve problems and keep things moving.”
On the second day, mechanical engineer Dr. Christian Hubicki taught the eighth-graders to create a projectile motion simulation using Python, showing how adjusting different variables could change the performances captured in the previous day’s videos.
“The students create visual displays by writing code, so they [are] having to convert analog [data] to digital,” Hester said. “[They are] then writing code to process the data using their physics knowledge, through what they’ve learned in engineering, to calculate [and] display the resultant force vectors under the feet through every frame.”
The final day was organized into stations, with groups rotating between touring the shop, a room that houses most of the robotics equipment, examining past students’ projects, learning about one of the robotics team’s robots, and recording their shooting form with force plates and cameras to examine the forces at work and modify their techniques in order to score. The plates were borrowed from USC, but were originally made for a Nike research lab, and similar technology is utilized in Olympic Training Centers. The data collected by various organizations, including Westview, using these plates will be showcased in the California Science Museum’s “Prepare to Play” exhibit, a display of different movements’ analyses.
Westview also uses this technology to contribute to USC’s biomechanics program.
“With the Integrative Movement Science Team, we’re contributing the work that we’re doing here at Westview to a movement library that’s going into an archive at USC,” Hester said. “People will be able to access all of those movements alongside Olympic athletes and collegiate athletes with the intention of people being able to study those vector overlays during [the 2028 LA Olympics].”
According to Arnav Wagh (12), this ongoing project involves multiple areas of Westview’s engineering and physics programs.
“The data collection team gets [the camera’s and force plate’s] data in a video file and force file, and sends it to the software team, where we use the program we made to create a vector overlay video of the resultant force vector,” he said. “[The vector overlay is then] drawn onto the video of the athlete, and graphs of their force data placed underneath their video so you can see the actual Newtons of force that they’re generating at any moment of time.”
Nishk Shah (12) said that by introducing the incoming freshmen to biomechanics analysis, one of the mentors’ goals was to secure the future of the project.
“We really hope that when the middle-schoolers come to Westview, they take our engineering courses and continue our progress on the USC biomechanics project,” he said. “More importantly, we hope we exposed them to the many engineering fields at Westview and inspired them to pursue a STEM field.”
Ultimately, for mentors like Lanting Jiang (9), the main hope of the workshop was to help the girls discover a passion that could change the course of their life.
“I think it’s so important that girls in middle and high school get the exposure they need to become interested in STEM, and it leads to so many pathways that they never would’ve known about,” Jiang said. “I feel like with enough encouragement and support, their interests in STEM and other fields will grow as well as the confidence they have.”