Playground Physics

Discover and explore the physics in your own movements. Record a video of you or your friends, tap points along the way to trace a path of motion, and discover the motion, forces, and energy involved.

Educators can make Newton’s Laws of motion come alive with an app that was named one of Fast Company’s Top 10 mobile apps! Join a community of educators making inspiring learning experiences with Noticing Tools.

“Playground Physics is one of the most fun units that I’ve done in a long time. I’ve been teaching about 12 years, and everybody had a great time.” - Stacey, 8th grade science teacher

In Playground Physics, you can:

• Record a video of a performance or choose a stock video.
• Tap points along the video to trace a path of motion.
• Examine your performance closely with scrubbing video controls.
• Enter known measurements (height of an object, mass of the object being tracked) in English or metric units to reveal accurate data of your performance.
• Explore interactive, scrubbable graphs synchronized to the video playback. Graphs display the distance traveled and speed along the path in horizontal and vertical vectors.
• Add stickers to mark important moments in the performance (and for a laugh!).
• Play your video back in slow motion to closely examine your movements.
• Explore how distance, speed, and direction changes when things move.
• Understand how a person's or object's potential and kinetic energy change as they move.
• Save your performance as videos with data overlays or editable scenes.
• Share your performance videos or transfer editable scenes to other cloud services and apps through use of the Files app.

Ideal for middle and high school school science classrooms, Playground Physics and accompanying curriculum activities are aligned to and embody the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by integrating core ideas, scientific practices, cross-cutting concepts, and delight! The new 2023 edition of the curriculum is freely available at: https://noticing.nysci.org/apps/playground-physics/

Playground Physics is one of the Noticing Tools (TM) from the New York Hall of Science. The full suite includes Choreo Graph, Fraction Mash, Size Wise, Volumize, and Picture Dots.

Noticing Tools were developed in collaboration with Local Projects, an award-winning media design firm based in New York. http://localprojects.com/