Torque is fun!

What is Torque?
Torque is the application of a Force acting at an specific distance and tending to cause rotation.

Picture taken from: www.torqueleader.com



How is torque calculated?
Torque is the result of multiplying the value of Force applied by the Distance from the point of
application.
Comparing two examples, we could notice that the same resultant Torque can be achieved with
a lower Force if the Distance from the nut/bolt is increased.

In order for us to learn what a Torque is, we had a small activity last week in our physics class. We use a lever, a ruler, and several metric masses. 
We tried to balance the ruler by itself but it looked impossible, so we added a clip to one of the ruler's ends in order for the ruler to be balanced. 




Once we had our ruler balanced, we added the metric masses to the knife-edge clamps which were located at each end of the ruler.
When finally we had our ruler balanced with the masses, we wrote down our data and with that data we got the torque force of the two metric masses.

During this activity we had a lot of fun because our teacher, José Popoff, took us to the playground and let us play with the merry-go-round. So yes, Physics CAN be fun! :)
As we said before, torque is a forde applied at a certain distance that causes rotation, so we can see that in a merry-go-round game we find a torque. Why? Because a force is being applied at a certain distance from the center of the object and it is causing it to rotate.

The activity wasn't over yet. While we were in the classroom we had another activity. This time we used something that looked like a bicycle's wheel (actually it was one) and a rotating board. We had a lot of fun because we didn't know what was going to happen.

We got on top of the rotating board and hold the wheel with our hands. Someone else would come and make the wheel spin for us and we would turn the wheel in different directions and what this caused was that we started rotating in the opposite direction from where the wheel was going.

The day was almost over but we had something else to do before we left. We observed ans "played" with a gyroscope, which by the way is a very interesting and curious instrument. You could trick anyone with one of those things. It was a very interesting activity, I really enjoyed it. It was really fun. :)