Mythbusters-Force

I thought Mythbusters was off the air, but its not! Which is awesome. I think it is a great show and a cool way to talk about scientific investigations.

This past week in 5th grade science, the 5th graders started designing a simple experiment to test the effect of force on an object. I like using Mythbuster videos to show students how to design scientific investigations. Not every investigation they do checks all the boxes, but it does allow us to discuss the questions they are asking, the variable, their steps, and how they can make a new investigation.

I spent sometime this week looking for some Mythbusters videos that show investigations dealing with force to show our 5th graders and then discuss.

If you use a service like View Pure, you can enter the link from YouTube and get a new link without ads or distracting side menus that YouTube might have.

Video #1
Cars Crashing into each other at 50mph

Video #2
Car crashing into wall at 100mph

Video #3
Dropping concrete on a car to make it somersault

Video #4
Eggs holding lots of weight

Video #5
Phone Book Friction

With each of these videos, you can ask the following questions:

What question is the investigation designed to answer?
What is the independent variable? What are the mythbusters changing?
What are the steps to their investigation?
What do you wonder? <--This question is to see if students think of similar investigations they could do. This is helpful as the TEKS states they should be designing their own experiment.

There are more force videos available, but these have no beeped language in them.

You can just have a class discussion after watching the videos or have students write their answers here.