Today’s video comes from CGP Grey and finishes our traffic and car theme for today. It helps walk through some of the most common traffic related problems and why we can sometimes experience backups that appear out of nowhere! If you’ve ever driven (or will drive!) you’ll have to deal with traffic sooner or later. Maybe knowing why it pops up can make it a little easier to deal with? …no, I didn’t really buy that either.
Sticking with today’s theme of traffic and car related materials, Traffic Simulator gives you and your students a chance to see how slight changes in road systems, driving patterns, and other factors can lead to major back-ups on our roadways.
The initial pattern on the website is a steady circle of traffic (ring road), and you can manipulate different factors such as the total number of cars on the road, the number of those that are trucks, and the acceleration of those vehicles to show how each affects the traffic in a closed system. Once you’ve played with that and messed up rush hour, you can try the other traffic patterns, such as adding an on-ramp (above), off-ramp, construction, hill, or detour to see how each can also change the traffic. Different elements can again be manipulated to test the roads and demonstrate how different factors can lead to traffic nightmares.
Explanations of some of the physics and psychology of traffic are provided through the links on the sidebar, as well as different ways to use the simulation. Traffic Simulator is a wonderful tool for seeing how traffic patterns can shift and change and what affects them, as well as providing students with some problem solving as they work through how to alleviate the traffic and find the ideal conditions for each roadway.
From the MinutePhysics YouTube Channel, this video explains why the planets in our solar system orbit on a flat plane, rather than zipping around the sun in any direction they choose.
From the VSauce Youtube Channel, this video addresses one of those “age-old questions” of what would happen if everyone in the world, all 6 billion+ of us, jumped at once in one location…SPOILER: not much.
Use the photos posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of a photo analysis.
From Minute Physics, learn about the basics of rocket science, super simplified! Basic concepts like force, acceleration, and orbital physics are covered.
From VSauce, today’s video tries to answer the self-described “silly question” of how much a shadow weighs. Michael takes a look at light functions and the force of light, what can cast shadows (including Venus!), and the speed of light and its properties and limitations.
Today’s video from TED takes an animated look at the story of Archimedes and the bath that led to his discovery for finding the volume and then density of objects by measuring water displacement. Learn about the problem Archimedes was given by the king and how his serendipitous discovery became the basis for an entire field of physics, fluid mechanics.
Today’s video looks at the physics of creating electricity. Learn how running a magnet through a cooper pipe will result in changing magnetic fields the in turn can generate electricity and see an example of the original Faraday electromagnet that helped set the bar for modern electric generators.
Today’s video takes the classic explanations of how wings work to produce life and allow flight and helps to account for variations in these. The result is finding two different, but both valid explanations for how wings work.
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