Copyright 2001 American Association of Physics Teachers

A force platform can be an excellent teaching aid in undergraduate physics classes and laboratories. Recently, Cross showed how to increase student interest and understanding of elementary mechanics by using a force platform to study everyday human movements such as walking, running, and jumping. My experiences with using a force platform in undergraduate classes have also been highly favourable. The aim of this article is to show how a force platform analysis of the standing vertical jump may be used in teaching the kinematics and dynamics of one-dimensional motion. I use computer software that produces curves of velocity and displacement of the jumper’s center of mass by numerical integration of the force–time record from a force platform. A simultaneous examination of these curves gives an effective illustration of the relations between the forces acting on a body and the resulting acceleration, velocity, and displacement of the body.