  Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in analyzing the motion of
objects in video data as a way for students to connect the concepts of physics
to something tangible like a video recording of an experiment. A variety of
software exists for students to look at individual frames and click on the
object to infer the x,y position. Some of these tools include a capability to
automatically identify the position of the object in the frame. But it is not
unusual, especially when inexperienced users are recording the video and
configuring the program, for these algorithms to struggle to "lock on" to the
moving object. In this paper, we both include some general advice to help
object tracking algorithms locate an object and we provide our own algorithms
that are simpler and potentially more effective than the sophisticated image
processing algorithms that are currently being used. These algorithms focus not
on a "template image" of the moving object but instead distinguish between the
object and the background by analyzing only the colors of individual pixels.
These algorithms are built into a free and open source program called the
STEMcoding Object Tracker (http://go.osu.edu/objecttracker) which works in the
browser (without any downloads) and is compatible with a variety of operating
systems including chromebooks.
