What happens when your kids won’t give you a turn on the Wii? Simple. You take their LEGO bricks and their slinky and do some physics. I will keep this simple. Basically, I created a slinky holder out of LEGO pieces and added LEGO bricks to the end to stretch it. Here is the video.
Lego + Slinky = Physics from Rhett Allain on Vimeo.
Maybe in an un-Dot Physics fashion, I am not going to analyze this data. I am not going to even describe the physics. Instead, I will leave this as a What Can You Do With This in the style of Dan Meyer.
I will give a couple of hints. First, I put this on vimeo because there you can easily download the video (look in the lower right)
Second – if you want to analyze the video, or take measurements, I recommend Tracker Video for video analysis.
One more thing, here is a bonus video.
Oscillating LEGO bricks on a slinky from Rhett Allain on Vimeo.
Feel free to analyze that, but there may be a problem. Hint 2: the mass of the LEGO bricks is small. That is all I am going to say.