6th Grade Invention Convention

We started our Inane Innocuous Invention Convention Project for 2012. Today we began building our inventions which are our own Rube Goldberg creations. Our invention must accomplish a simple everyday task and can not use batteries. We introduced Newton's First Law with a couple of demos:
Place a vase, metal pie pan, cardboard tube and egg in a tower. Quickly knock the pie pan horizontally and this should cause the egg to fall in to the vase. Egg Drop Experiment.

Sometimes the cardboard tube lands in the vase, too.

The second demo uses Inertia Rings balanced on top of a plastic soda bottle and then a small hex nut balanced on top of the ring.
We all tried grabbing the ring and allowing the hex nut to fall into the bottle.

These two activities show Newton's First Law. He said that since the egg is not moving while it sits on top of the tube it stays in place - ah, no force is acting upon it.  We applied enough force to the pie pan to cause it to zip out from under the cardboard tube. We knocked the support out from under the egg. The egg didn’t move because it was already stationary (not moving). Then, the force of gravity took over and pulled the egg straight down toward the center of the Earth.