Eye-opening experiments

For his seventh-grade science project, Zachary Halperin studied how Major League Baseball sluggers pulled a fast one on the league’s umpires.

“I’m a baseball maniac, so I wanted to know if corking a bat makes a difference,” he said. “It was baseball players’ way of cheating before steroids.”

Two bats lay across his booth at Kinneret Day School’s seventh-grade science fair on Jan. 24. One was a standard wooden bat. The other was stuffed with Super Balls. To do this, Zachary sawed out the center and then sealed it with glue after stuffing it.

The rubber balls he put inside the six-inch cavity weigh less than the wood he removed, Zachary explained. This lets players swing more easily while still using a standard-shaped bat. Cheating athletes typically used cork, Super Balls or Styrofoam to rig their bats.

Zachary tested the bats out in 20-degree weather. He hit with both 25 times, launching balls a median of 122 feet with the standard bat and a median of 128 feet with the corked bat.

“It’s going to be my first year of using a wooden bat, so I just might cork it,” he joked about his upcoming season with the Greenwich Village Little League.

The seventh graders’ booths covered everything from what material makes the best raft –— wood, plastic, Styrofoam or paper lined with tinfoil --–– to how temperature affects the life of a bubble. Lynne Fried-Whyne, a Kinneret science teacher, said students were permitted to study anything related to the physical sciences. 

The eighth graders who participated in a science fair last week completed projects related to earth science; sixth graders will focus on life sciences at their upcoming science fair; and fifth graders will hold an “invention convention” next month.

At the seventh-grader fair, Almog Cohen demonstrated how to separate hues into their primary colors. She folded a coffee filter into a small sliver, dipped the tip of it in brown food coloring, and then placed the point on a sponge sitting in a glass of water.

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