Wanna Have a Catch?

As with These Shoes Weren't Made for Walking, I again wanted to make mechanics personal and give users a directly feel for how physics worked while allowing users to explore together.  One of my favorite parts of physics is the physics of rotation from conservation of angular momentum to centrifugal force.

For this exhibit, I remembered an inflatable ball that I had gotten as a kid with a set of magnets on one side.  While I never discovered what the magnets were for, they served as weights that dramatically offset the ball's center of mass such that when you threw it with any amount of spin it fluttered through the air in an odd pattern making it extremely difficult to catch.  My goal here was pure replication.

I found simple plastic balls and attached a weight to one side and gave it to friends to play with.  While invariable, friends loved throwing the ball on the ground and smashing it, others tried rolling it and seemed to have a lot of fun watching the unexpected patterns and moves it made.

On one hand, I know that moving forward I would have to make the ball much more durable so that any kid big or small would have trouble destroying it no matter how much he or she smashed it.  On the other hand, I would love to increase the ways in which a user could interact with it by making it able to bounce.  Lastly, while I was able to encourage friends to play catch with me and then discover the "wow" factor behind the ordinary ball, I would want to design a way to make it seem more intuitive for others to play with the ball such as an instructive and catchy title such as "Wanna Have a Catch?"