Week 5: Who Is in Control in the Air?

Height and airtime don't move when you change air control — but where you land does, and that's a different kind of measurement.

22 March 2027

Question

Last week’s two numbers, gravity and launch speed, both changed how high and how long you’re in the air. Air control changes neither. So what is it actually doing, and which of the Jump Lab’s logged numbers would show it?

Prediction (skip if you’d rather just look)

Before running anything: do you expect displacement (how far you travelled horizontally) to change if you turn air control down to its minimum while holding a direction the whole jump? What about height?

Experiment

Open the Jump Lab, set air control near its minimum, and run three trials holding a direction key the entire time you’re airborne. Log height, displacement and airtime. Now raise air control to near its maximum, change nothing else, and repeat. Height and airtime should barely move between the two sets — you’re spending the same time under the same gravity. Displacement is where the difference shows up: high air control lets you redirect your horizontal speed mid-flight, low air control locks in whatever direction you had at takeoff.

Explanation

Air control governs how much a held direction can change your horizontal velocity while you’re airborne — it’s independent of the vertical physics that gravity and launch speed own. That’s why a floaty preset and a precise preset can share a height and an airtime but still feel completely different to steer: floaty presets in this course carry high air control (you can correct a misjudged jump on the way up), while precise presets carry low air control (once you’ve committed to a direction, you’re mostly locked into it). Neither is “more correct” — they’re a design choice about how much of the outcome is decided at takeoff versus in the air.

Why displacement, not just "did you clear the gap"

Two jumps can both clear the same gap while landing at very different points past it — one skims the far edge, the other lands well past it with room to spare. Displacement is the number that distinguishes those two outcomes; “cleared it or didn’t” collapses them into the same result, which is exactly the kind of measurement this course keeps warning against.

Task

Hold air control fixed at your choice of a single value, then run three trials each with the direction key held for the whole jump versus not held at all. Report the displacement difference between the two conditions, and one sentence on whether that difference matches what you’d expect from this week’s explanation.

Teaching team