🤾‍♀️ Inertia – how to do

How to recognize inertia around us? How to understand and observe Newton’s first law at home? Let’s find the answers together.

Ask your parents, grannies, bigger sister or brother, or any other older relatives to help you with these activities.

💡 1. Observation
You need 6 coins for example (or 6 tokens, chips, dices). It is important that all 6 elements be at one and the same size.

Now take 5 coins and arrange them in a column, tightly one after the other.
Now place the 6th object (coin) on the table but at a distance from the others. Drag the 6th coin to the coins column, reinforcing it as you drag. What happened when the 6th coin struck the coins in the column? What coin has moved? Which coins remained stationary? Why?

Correct! After the 6th coin struck the column of the 5 coins, only the first coin has moved, the one at the bottom of the column. It shifted in the direction opposite of the direction of the incoming 6th coin. The others remained motionless without changing their location, resisting the impact of the 6th coin.

💡 2. Observation

Fill up a glass of water with water. Place it on the table. Place a cardboard rectangle on the cup (it can be a paper card, a cardboard rectangular piece cut out by you, a pentagonal piece of cardboard box, etc.). Place the column of coins on top of the cardboard rectangle as they are ordered in a column. Pull out the cardboard sharply.

What happened? Did the coins fall into the cup or remain on the cardboard? Did you notice that for a split second, the column of coins remained in the air after you abruptly pulled out the card, and then fell?

What do we observe in both observations?

That’s right – inertia in stationary objects (those that are at rest until something affects them).

Everything you observed is described by Newton’s first law.