The Big Apple Circus' jugglers, clowns and high-flying acrobats provide an entertaining and engaging way to introduce basic physics concepts to high school students. Eight videos feature footage from the series and interviews with the performers to illustrate the laws of physics at work. For deeper exploration, each video has a corresponding Study Guide for students and an Activity Guide for teachers, as well as raw video clips of performances which can be used for analysis in the classroom.
Newton's actual documents scanned from the Newton Project at the Cambridge University Library. Interesting for PYP students to see his diagrams, and read the original laws and examples
It appears that when you tap the angry yellow bird, two things can happen. First, it increases its speed to 30 m/s (in the same direction that it was going). Second, if its velocity is greater than 20°; below the horizontal the vertical acceleration will be lower than 9.8 m/s2.
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States government's most infamous agency, the powerhouse of space exploration -- teaches you the basics of Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion. Who better to learn motion theory from than NASA?
Ice-skating is can be a really fun activity… strap on a pair of skates and you can glide across the smooth, hard surface of the ice! But when you step off the ice rink, have you ever noticed that your skates don’t glide so easily over other smooth, hard surfaces, like cement or tile?? That’s because other surfaces don’t have the same unique and awesome properties of water that make ice slippery and help facilitate activities like ice-skating!
In order to start thinking about why soap is slippery, let’s first think about when soap is slippery. Have you ever noticed that when soap is dry, it’s not really slippery at all? It’s only when you add water to soap that it becomes so slick and slippy! -- The reason dry soap is less slippery than wet soap is because of something called friction
f you’ve ever been really cold and rubbed your hands together quickly to warm up, you’ve felt friction. You actually experience friction all the time! Whenever any two objects rub together there is a force that makes them not glide smoothly. This force is friction, and it’s a good thing friction exists! Otherwise, every time we took a step we would slip, slide and not stop!
Friction is the "evil" of all motion. No matter which direction something moves in, friction pulls it the other way. Move something left, friction pulls right. Move something up, friction pulls down. It appears as if nature has given us friction to stop us from moving anything.
Every object in the Universe attracts every other object in the universe. This invisible force for masses to move toward each other is called Gravity.
When you weight yourself, your weight may be around 30kg to maybe 50kg because of Gravity. Your weight is the result from the product of the force of gravity and the mass of you.
Why two masses separated in space have a gravitational attraction to one another remains unknown, despite much research and various theories. These theories are listed on the left: Newton, Einstein, and Quantum.
Because gravity is an invisible force of nature, it's often difficult to express it in a way that children can comprehend. Build your child's knowledge of the universe by explaining the concept of gravity in language they can grasp.
Gravity attracts all objects towards each other. Gravity has been around since the very beginning of the universe, and it works the same way everywhere in the universe, on all kinds of different objects, of all different sizes (larger than atoms - those are held together by atomic forces instead). The bigger an object is, and the closer you are to it, the stronger its gravitational pull is.
For every action, there is not an equal and opposite reaction.
The reason that the shuttle astronauts act weightless is that they're inside a container which is FALLING! If the shuttle were to sit unmoving on top of your ladder (it's a strong ladder,) the shuttle would no longer be falling, and its occupants would feel nearly normal weight. And if you were to leap from your ladder, you would feel just as weightless as an astronaut (at least you'd feel weightless until you hit the ground!)
Exploration/Tinkering
Exploratory play is about asking questions: “What happens when I do this?” “What if I did it this way?” Experimenting with materials and pushing their limits encourages us to consider a wide range of possibilities when problem-solving. Playing around with objects and ideas helps us see that there may be more than one solution.
What it shows: Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion. One might call this kinetic art and the choreography of the dance of the pendulums is stunning! Aliasing and quantum revival can also be shown.
I decided it was time to look into the physics behind this game and whether or not it might offer a potential new way to engage my students in physics.
Understanding the laws of physics, including Newton's three laws of motion, gives an athlete a clearer picture of how our bodies respond to exercise. This understanding can be used to alter your workout to take advantage of these natural laws. These laws can also be used to help protect us from injury when working out by understanding how our body responds to inertia, acceleration and momentum.
Physics plays an important role in tennis, as wind, gravity, the racket and the ground all affect the balls you hit. Sir Isaac Newton's three laws of motion come into play in different ways than in other sports, such as golf, where the ball remains motionless until you strike it, or bowling, where the pins remain motionless until your ball strikes them. In tennis, the point starts with you tossing the ball, so the ball is always in motion when you make contact with it.