Year 10 did a "lab circus" of mini investigations as part of our warmup to learning about forces. We seperated iron filings from cereal, observed what happens to a ping pong ball in a hair dryer, struck matches while thinking about the forces, considered the buoyancy of a cork, tried using a balloon and cloth to investigate static, and considered what a "twist" action is by using a can opener. In all these mini investigations the students had to draw force diagrams and label the direction of all the forces acting on the system. This gave us a great segue into our work on Newton's laws and how forces are linked to motion.
