Learning Lesson: Atmospheric Collisions

Can you get a golf ball to bounce 28 feet high? The video demonstrates the impressive bounce of a stacked ball drop. After explaining the physics of the ball drop and bounce, the video relates it to supernovas. The science content comes...

Choosing between a medicine ball and a basketball, which will hit the ground first when dropped? Learners watch as visitors at a festival demonstrate in an interview-style video. The narrator asks visitors to guess, then drops the balls....

Students create models of the earth's atmosphere to explore how gases that are dissolved in water can eventually create acid rain. After conducting a series of experiments within their models of the earth's atmosphere, students analyze...

Learners participate in a demonstration showing the concept of precipitation. They view the hydrologic cycle and identify its stages, and discuss flash flood safety at the end the lesson plan.

An activity where students demonstrate elastic potential energy and gravitational potential energy by looking at the travel height of a ping pong when dropped vs a ping pong dropped with a "dropper popper".

What happens when you drop a stack of bouncy balls together? Watch this classic momentum transfer demonstration, and discover how it relates to a supernova. [3:33]

Brian Cox visits NASA's Space Power Facility to demonstrate what happens when a bowling ball and a feather are dropped together under the conditions of space. [4:41]

Momentum transfer is demonstrated by dropping a perfectly balanced stack of balls. How is the result like a supernova? [3:33]

Students experiment with varied balls to determine the bounce factor in centimeters. In this physics lesson, students experiment to find the height a ball must be dropped from the have the highest bounce rate. Students graph the results...

Students perform an experiment that demonstrates acid rain. The chemical effect of acids on metals may take at least five days for the human eye to see, even though the reaction starts as soon as the acid contacts the metal.