Inertia demonstrations

Welcome back to school and I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break. I took my family to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the California Academy of Sciences.

Just before we left for vacation we filmed demonstrations on inertia. Students created their own demonstrations from objects from home or around the class and wrote a script to explain the demonstrations. Below are three examples. Don't forget to turn up the volume.










In case you can't hear the videos, all objects need to have a net unbalanced force exerted on them in order to speed up, slow down, or change direction. In the first example, the student exerted a force on the index card so it accelerated forward. The washer would have stayed stationary forever, but the absence of the card holding it up meant that there was a net unbalanced force (gravity) that pulled it down. It would have kept falling down forever, but the table exerted a force on it to stop it.

If you want a copy of your video, email me and I'll send it on.