LEGO® BRICKS, NEWTON, AND ROTATIONAL INERTIA!
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
---Alexander Pope
I love asking my students "what is inertia?" Inevitably I get responses like..."uhhh it's real important." "It's something."
"Ask Wally." "Didn't Newton's Apple talk about that?" And the classic: "It's stuff."
LEGO® bricks are a wonderful teaching tool to explore rotational inertia. That famous dead guy
Newton, once said that "every body persists in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line
unless compelled by external force to change that state." Of course he probably said it with an
English accent!
To take this idea another step ( like we were walking ideas or something ) things that are
spinning want to stay spinning unless acted upon by some external force. With straight old inertia,
it's just mass that is important...but with rotational inertia the distribution of mass counts as
well!
The Following are Examples of LEGO® Examples of Rotational Inertia!
Go Back to Weird Richard
Copyright© 1996 by Richard Wright for PCS Education Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Shawn and Jason working on an inertia car!
A Flywheel Model!
Another Flywheel Model!
Yet Another Flywheel Model!
Still Another Flywheel Model!
Okay, A Flywheel Model! (You never can have too many o' them flywheel models, by golly!!)
What You Need to Make A Cool PCS Top!
The Cool PCS Top in Action!
Sean and His Top!
Inertia With Gogolplex!
A Movie of Gogolplex Rotational Inertia!