On a beautiful, hot Saturday we thought what better way to spend a lazy day than playing with Legos and using a balloon to see if we could make the cars move from place to place. Multiple attempts were made and some of them less successful than others but we finally got the cars to move.
Newton's first law of motion (also known as law of inertia) states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. So we discussed that her lego car will not move because it is at rest unless its moved by and external force such as a balloon blowing out air, a wind gust, water pushing it, or even her hand moving it. Trial and error showed the best way to attach the balloon to the car and a rush of water randomly showing up at the curb was perfect for this experiment too.
We didn't have any lego car wheels so we had to get a lego car set to steal the wheels off of but its a win win situation because now she has a new lego set to put together another time.
Any lego car set will do because you'll be making your own car with an area to hold the balloon.
Then we took it one step further and did another inertia experiment using an egg. The whole premise is that even though force is exerted onto the plate which then in turn knocks into the toilet paper holder, the egg that is remaining at rest will stay in that state and fall straight down into a glass. Fi loved this experiment and did it at least 20 times with both a real egg and a plastic Easter egg.
Sh'e excited but a little nervous.
She clearly thinks it's all going wrong after she hits the plate.
Checking to see what happened to the egg.
It worked!
Below is one of the many times she did the experiment!
These are just two fun ideas to test out the Law of Inertia but there are many more so get out there and have fun playing with science!