Force & Motion

Think back to when you were a little kid playing one of your most enjoyable family games on Saturday night. It involved rolling a die and moving around a game board, all while building a complex “mousetrap”, hoping that you wouldn’t get caught in its devious shenanigans or secretly wishing that its numerous “Energy Transfers” would fail to work!

Whether we realize it or not, all velocity/speed measurements are made relative to some other object. When your car's speedometer reads 55 mph, the assumption is that the change in position of the car compared to the stationary ground is 55 miles every hour. However, not all velocity/speed measurements are made relative to a stationary object. The Constant Velocity cars allow students to experimentally investigate relative speeds as the cars with different speeds move in the same and in opposite directions.

Bottle rocket launchers can be a great way to increase interest as your class kicks off this Fall. We’ve collected some tips for how to get more out of these rocket powered demonstrations and launch your students into the world of force and motion in full Cool Stuff fashion.

Hold a friendly contest to engage interest [...]

Spin this top once, and it will run for…. well quite a while. But how does it work? Interesting question since rotational energy can not come out of nowhere. You will need to look deep inside the Perpetual Top to find the secret of its seemingly endless rotational energy.

When you first open the package, you’ll [...]

Fact or Fiction??

The Amazing Water Slide: How it was done
Last week we shared a video clip of a man in a neoprene wetsuit sliding down a water slide, hitting a ramp, and then flying 115 feet through the air to land safely in a small children's pool. Just like many video segments from the web [...]

Many scientific measuring instruments have dials with pointers to indicate the magnitude of the measurements. A pointer is actually a lever which magnifies the distance that the instrument moves. In ordinary clocks, speedometers and electric meters for example, the rotating shafts move very small distances, but the pointers greatly magnify these motions so they are easy to see.

A truck is traveling 60mph, a baseball shoots out of the back at 60mph. Do you really expect the ball to drop straight down?

Every day we have to make choices. Sometimes these can be life changing. In the Firing Squad Demo the student you pick to be the target, will have to choose between two dart guns to be shot with!

alileo theorized that in the absence of any other force, a moving object will continue to move. He called this resistance to changes in motion, inertia. Sir Isaac Newton later polished this concept – turning it into his first law, the Law of Inertia. From his Principia:Every object continues in a state of rest or of uniform speed in a straight line unless acted on by a nonzero net force.

Sometimes just witnessing a physics demonstration can inspire students to look more deeply into conceptual nature of the demonstration and strengthen their critical thinking skills. The Pendulum Wave is a device that provides such an opportunity. It consists of a series of pendulum with increasing periods that when simultaneously released, produce the effect of a changing transverse wave that cycles back to the beginning conditions.