By: Kathryne Vetter

PurposeTo determine if a swim cap affects your time by

reducing drag in swimming and if it affects by a small amount or no time at all.

Hypothesis

That a swim cap will affect your time in swimming because it will reduce drag maybe not a lot but.

Experimental DesignIndependent Variable: Swim Cap or No Swim Cap

Dependent Variable: Time (seconds)Constants: Pressure in room, Type of Liquid,

Length Of Pool, Type of swim cap, Type of Timer.

Levels SWIM CAP

NO SWIM CAP

RepeatedTrials

5 5

Procedure1. Swimmer 1 will swim a 50 (2 laps) with wearing a swim cap2. Start the timer when Swimmer 1 jumps of starting block and

hits water3. End Timer when Swimmer 1 touches wall were they started4. Record Data In Notebook5. Give Swimmer 1 10 minutes to recoup6. Now Ask Swimmer 1 to swim another 50without wearing a

swim cap7. Start Timer when swimmer hits water8. End timer when swimmer 1 touches wall they started at9. Record Data10. Repeat steps 1-9 with different swimmers

DiagramTim

e45 sec

Stopwatch

Swim Cap

Swimmer

Pool

Data Table

1 Swimmer

Swim NoCap Cap

2 Swimmer

Swim NoCap Cap

3 Swimmer

Swim NoCap Cap

4 Swimmer

Swim NoCap Cap

5 Swimmer

Swim NoCap Cap

55 53(secs) (secs)

42 47(secs) (secs)

51 52(secs) (secs)

49 53(secs) (secs)

65 66(secs) (secs)

Swimmers

Time (seconds)

Graph

ConclusionThis experiment was to see if the swim cap

really does affect your time as for why people where them to shave off seconds but does it really work? In this experiment was used swim cap or no cap as our independent variable and time as our dependent variable. There were 5 trials for each swim cap and no swim cap. Each trial was a different swimmer. The mean for when a swimmer used a swim cap was 52.4 seconds, and the mean when swimmers didn’t use a swim cap was 54.2.

Conclusion The hypothesis that the swim cap will affect

your time was supported by the data collected. For example the means for wearing a swim cap and not wearing one were different by 2 seconds. There was one were the Swimmer had a faster time swimming without a swim cap then he/she did wearing one. The graph shows that most times were lower wearing a swim cap then it does not wearing one.

Conclusion Why the swim cap affected your time was because of

drag. Drag is pull, as against a resistance. Why this affected it is because when wearing a swim cap you are enabling more skin cells to fly right off, which then water will moves right past you easier therefore creating less drag or friction drag when swimming. Others have been proven that shaving or wearing a cap creates less drag making you able to travel more strokes per second. For example if someone had a big meet and they were going up against a great swimmer they might wear a swim cap to reduce drag even if it only affects your time by a couple seconds.