Torque: Fulcrum Balancing Simulation

Activity Description

This interactive simulation worksheet helps students understand how a lever works, what is gravitation force, what is torque and what are balanced and unbalanced forces. In this activity, students are give a lever setup with a 20g load on the left side of the fulcrum and a 500g counterweight on the right side of the fulcrum. Students have to try different positions for the counterweight to balance the lever. Instead of trying numerous positions randomly, after doing one or two experiments, students will start to build a pattern and relationship in their mind. This helps them establish a relationship between torque, mass and distance from the fulcrum/center.

Repeat the experiment for different given positions of the load, run the simulation until the balancing position of the counterweight is found and record the values to the table.

Learning Objective

This simulation worksheet helps the students to understand what is torque, what is balanced and unbalanced forces, and how gravitational force works. The activity is a hands on digital simulation that motivates students to build the relationship between the mass, the distance from the center and torque.

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