Simple Experiment for Students to Test Their Reaction Time

Reaction time can become a great experiment in a classroom. You would simply ask for a student to come to the front of the class and you would ask them to put out their hand as if they were going to pinch something between their thumb and index finger. Their fingers need to be a full inch apart or an exact number of centimeters that comes close to about 1 inch. You may try different distances for the spread of the fingers for this experiment. Smaller distances may not work well. The teacher would hold a meter stick at the "0" point at the point between the fingers of the student. The teacher would tell the student that when the meter stick is dropped the student should catch the stick between their fingers, but must not move their hand downward. When the meter stick is dropped the student will react and their reaction time is proportional to the distance on the meter stick. The student can record the location on the meter stick in centimeters. This can be done over and over and the different distances can be recorded. Usually they get a bit better at this with more attempts.

The teacher can do this with more students working in groups, but remember the tendency children will have to use the meter stick as swords. If you keep the groups well apart this tendency can be kept to a minimum and you want to keep them from accidentally hitting each other. The students may have to stand on something to be high enough to drop the meter stick. It is important that this be something very stable and not overly high. Students will try to anticipate the drop of the meter stick and if you slightly move it you can sometimes cause them to pinch their fingers. Students will also try to move their two fingers closer together as the experiment continues to have an advantage. Students can not do this experiment on themselves because we can't seem to independently drop and pinch.

Many things actually affect the reaction speed: anxiety, fatigue, medications, neural problems, age, left and right hand differences, sex, experience, training, intelligence etc. Although some of these factors may cause relatively small differences in reaction speed they have some effect. Reaction speed can be important for athletes in many sports. In tennis each player must react quickly to the movement of the ball, in running the athlete must start at the sound of the "gun", etc.

Another interesting experiment is to use the same pinching experiment, but in this case hold a crisp "dollar" fill and now place the bill between the fingers of the student in such a way that the head of the president on the bill is just below the pinch point. When the bill is released it is impossible to catch with a pinch if the fingers were far enough apart to start and if there was no anticipation to give the student the edge. Student, should they catch the bill will want to grab it as their own. To prevent that you can do the same experiment with a piece of paper the size of a dollar bill or some fake money. This version of the experiment does not give a distance measure.

You may remember a statement somewhat like this from television "If you can take the seeds from my hand grasshopper, then your reaction speed is pretty good."